Sequences

After ten years of being closed to the public, the restored building of the Museum will be opened on October 20 at 10am with the exhibition Sequences. Art of Yugoslavia and Serbia from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition encompasses the period from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, showcasing art created in Yugoslavia and Serbia today. Sequences is a historical exhibition that includes contemporary art, with the primary aim of reaffirming MoCAB’s collection and offering a new framework by which to become acquainted with and understand the art made on these territories. The author of the exhibition concept is Dejan Sretenović and curators of the exhibition are Mišela Blanuša, Zoran Erić and Dejan Sretenović.

The building of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade was built in the period from 1960 to 1965 and was opened to the public on October 20, 1965. The architects Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović won the most prestigious Yugoslav award for architecture that year and the building remains one of the landmarks of high modernist architecture of socialist Yugoslavia.

The building was closed in 2007 for reconstruction which has run intermittently over a period of ten years. The original concept and proportions of the building had to be preserved but also adjusted to new architectural standards and safety regulations. Two main projects were therefore vital, the lighting system and the interior design which comprised the refurbishment of the old and deteriorating elements of the interior; this also included the exhibition display infrastructure which is now made from new and durable materials to meet with the highest museological standards of today. The reconstruction included a sculpture park surrounding the Museum building with works from the most significant Yugoslav sculptors of the 20th century.

Sequences establishes a possible trajectory of movement through the archipelago of 20th century art, bringing new input into the corpus of extant knowledge and writing one version of the history of modern and contemporary art. In keeping with existing epistemological coordinates and analytical matrices, the exhibition brings forth a remapping, correction and revaluation of the 20th century art history, while reinventing some of the neglected and marginalised phenomena.

The exhibition is structured as a series of 18 sequences, freely grouped around a chronological axis following historical shifts in the art of Yugoslavia and Serbia for a period longer than one century. The notion of “sequence” is taken from film terminology, where it stands for a series of scenes, connected by the unity of time or location, forming a distinct narrative unit. Applied here, the notion of sequence is related to artistic currents, tendencies and movements, bound by the unity of time and space, i.e. poetic, linguistic and thematic relatedness. Sequences are spatial-temporal units, based on a dialectical relationship between museum representation as a material practice of arranging objects in space, and art historical narrativisation as a practice of writing which arranges these objects in historical time.

The exhibition is intended for the widest audience and consequently is didactically oriented, but the conception behind it is based on working concepts, methods and models active in contemporary history and the theory of art.

By presenting art from its collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art showcases also its own history, reminding us of the leading role it had in the operationalisation, representation and narrativisation of the Yugoslav art space in the socialist Yugoslavia, and also of the role it performs in Serbia today in bringing together artistic heritage and contemporary art.