At the +MSUM, several exhibitions of works from Moderna galerija’s collections have been staged, with special emphasis on the Arteast 2000+ collection. Arteast 2000+ is the first museum collection conceived with a focus on Eastern European postwar avant-garde art in a broader international context. Since its inception in 2000, the collection has become well known for providing a comprehensive overview of the art in the region. Similarly, it is recognized for the insight it provides into certain shared sociopolitical issues that are or were of central concern for the artists in the formerly socialist countries, outlining as it does the developments from the 1960s through the transition period in the 1990s to the present-day context of global neoliberal capitalism. In 2011, Arteast 2000+ became the core of the newly founded Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM), which operates as part of Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.
The current exhibition relies heavily on Arteast 2000+ collection, presenting it through the concept of art as work in the Yugoslav context in the work of avant-garde artists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and the change of both the concept of artistic work and the spaces of art in the 1990s. The exhibition features works by key Yugoslav postwar avant-garde artists and art collectives who developed a parallel infrastructure through their collective work, making the concept of work the subject of their art.
For example, the project by Goran Đorđević International Strike of Artists which should represent a boycott of the art system over a period of several months, or the work of Tomislav Gotovec, who cleaned the streets of Zagreb and stored and exhibited garbage as readymades. Also the film by Zoran Popović which shows the charms of leisure as something that inevitably awakens awareness of ourselves, that makes us real, and that gives us play from which creativity is released.
The art groups from the 1950s through the 1980s, such as EXAT 51, Gorgona, OHO, and Neue Slowenische Kunst, were in their work striving for a more equitable economy, equal participation, collectivity and solidarity. By virtue of their membership, their self-organization and a strong network of like-minded people, such art collectives served as a strategic alternative to the official (and poorly developed) cultural infrastructure, and as a tool for international communication. Thus they were direct or indirect critics of the dysfunctionality of the social utopia, and often offered a kind of social corrective in their own practices. On the example of their own collective work and self-organization, they strove to present authentic notions of collectivism, non-profit-based society, and society of solidarity. We could say that they were building institutions through their works, or in other words, that they were building their own historical/interpretive context in a situation where the institutions that should have systematized avant-garde art either did not exist or took a dismissive attitude towards such art. Because of that, artists were in many places compelled to themselves archive documents related to their own art, the art of other artists, and the broader art movements and conditions of production, and they also copied, quoted or commented on the absent history of local avant-garde art in the frame of their work. Such artists ran their own spaces, built networks and even formed an artistic state.
The exhibition also includes two projects. Impure, Democratic, Concrete: The Westeast Project, curated by Sezgin Boynik which focuses on the work by Franci Zagoričnik, one of the most active propagators of experimental writing for constructing new language in the multilingual socialist Yugoslavia. And a project called On Collectivizing: Narratives about Yugoslav Avant-Garde Art Collectives and Examples of Feminist Interventions curated by Jelena Vesić that in the broader thematic context opens a window into the history of women's, feminist, and socialist struggles - from the partisan movement and AFŽ, to socialist and non-alignment; from the re-opening of the issue of women's liberation with the Comrade Women conference to feminist antiwar and antinationalist activities in during the last decade of the 20th century.
Teja Merhar has conducted extensive research into and mapping of the independent spaces of the 1990s in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
Participants:
Walter De Maria | The Šempas Family | Goran Đorđević | György Galántai | Gorgona | Tomislav Gotovac | IRWIN | Neven Korda Andrič | Impure, Democratic, Concrete: The Westeast Project (curated by Sezgin Boynik) | Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) | Chronology of the [New] Tendencies (Darko Fritz) | OHO (Marko Pogačnik, Milenko Matanović, David Nez, Andraž Šalamun, Naško Križnar, Iztok Geister, Matjaž Hanžek) | On Collectivizing: Narratives about Yugoslav Avant-Garde Art Collectives and Examples of Feminist Interventions (curated by Jelena Vesić) (The Archive of Sanja Ivekovič | Džuverović (she/her) | Vukica Đilas | Goranka Matić, the conference Drug-ca žena | Darinka Pop-Mitić) | Marika & Marko Pogačnik | Darinka Pop-Mitić | Zoran Popović | Mladen Stilinović | Tone Stojko | Nebojša Šerić Šoba | Škart & the Single Mothers’ Association from Zemun (Udruženje samohranih majki izbeglica iz Zemuna) | Raša Todosijević | Slaven Tolj | Goran Trbuljak | TV Gallery
• The documentary exhibition The Lives of Monuments was developed at the seminar “Art for Community Use” at the Department of Art History of the University of Ljubljana, in cooperation with the Moderna galerija.
• The Temporary Slovene Dance Archive, transferred, in March 2018, into the keeping of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, where Rok Vevar performs a live archive-in-progress. Entering the institutional framework as an individual, the archivist has found material support and space while retaining his independence.
