MSUM: Special Projects

from 17.4.2012

Special projects: The Bosnia Archive, An Archive-in-becoming, The Punk Museum.

The Bosna Archive
In 1996 Moderna galerija staged a project entitled For the Museum of Contemporary Art Sarajevo 2000, which presented the works donated to the Bosnian capital by thirteen preeminent international artists. The museum in Sarajevo was expected to open by 2000, but unfortunately there is no telling even today when this might actually happen. What is far worse, today Sarajevo is a town of floundering or closed cultural institutions. Local authorities are unable to come to an agreement as to whose responsibility the museums and their collections are. National and international heritage is deteriorating there in full view of the entire world, so to speak. Similarly as during the war in Bosnia, nobody seems to be able to help.

An Archive-in-Becoming. Oral Histories, Digital Archives, and Connections (included in the Digitizing Ideas project)
Curator: Andreja Hribernik

The archive-in-becoming represents a special form of historicizing. It is established through various media, enabling various possible readings and interpretations, and existing only through connections.

As part of this archive-in-becoming, oral histories enable mapping the past from the point of view of artists and individuals working at a certain time and in a certain context. The project includes interviews with Marko Pogačnik, Vlado Martek, Zofija Kulik, and Bálint Szombathy. Either individually or in collaboration with other like-minded artists, these artists left their distinctive marks on the artistic practices in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. Characteristically, they endeavored to transcend traditional concepts of art and fuse the spheres of art and life (ART = LIFE). Through their works they expressed a critique of the then social system and a call for change that would not merely be political, but would trigger a different way of thinking and perceiving the world. In addition to the interviews, also their works of art are included in the archive, as well as documents that deal with the materiality of a work of art in relation to the idea and the process of its making.

The archive-in-becoming is not limited to the physical nor is it free of the physical, and can also be constituted through the digital media as a digital archive. The digitalization of the archival material in this project is based on the principle of exploring the relation between an artwork and documentation; it endeavors to follow the connections that exist between works also according to the way in which the database is structured.

This project focuses on archives of conceptual artistic practices; they are marked with the messages of the necessity of social change and of aspiration for freedom, equally if not more important today as in the past.

The Archive-in Becoming is part of the project Digitizing Ideas.
The project Digitizing Ideas: Archives of Conceptual Art Practices is done in collaboration between Moderna galerija (Ljubljana, Slovenia), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb, Croatia), the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (Novi Sad, Serbia), and the Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw, Poland).