Travelling Communiqué

The transdisciplinary exhibition Travelling Communiqué, which examines the role of one of the most important photographic archives of the 20^th century, the archive of the cabinet of the life-long president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), Josip Broz Tito and investigates the possibilities of its further use in the future, will be open on June 10^th at the Museum of Yugoslav History (MYH).

The project has been developed as a collective work by Armin Linke (Germany/Italy), Doreen Mende (Germany) and Milica Tomić (born in SFRY), in collaboration with the MYH team of curators (Radovan Cukić, Ivan Manojlović, Mirjana Slavković) and through discussions with a large number of international authors participating in the project.

The exhibition will feature more than sixty works, by forty-one authors from thirty-two countries, created in different media: video essays, photographs, collages, photo walls, films, articles, lectures, documentary material, etc.

The exhibition, which is carried out thanks to the digitization of 135,000 photographs (from the MYH photo archive that consists of around 300,000 photographic recordings), focuses on the First Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement held from September 1^st to 6^th, 1961 in Belgrade in the midst of the Cold War crisis, since the artists spontaneously showed interest for 1200 photographs documenting this event. The starting point of the Travelling Communiqué project is the idea that the collective statements, images and sounds that marked the First Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement still travel, until the present time, in search of an answer.

The works by the authors of the Travelling Communiqué project do not paint an glorified picture of the place of the Non-Aligned Movement in the political history of the time. Rather, they discover the possibilities for prolonging the moment of its founding and projecting it into the social circumstances of the present moment. The Non-Aligned Movement is understood as the third space allowing emancipation and an attempt to unlock the diversity of the anticolonial thought. Viewed in this way, Travelling Communiqué is an attempt at political subjectivization of those whose voices exist despite efforts to silence them.

The level of interest, shown by a large number of international artist wishing to take part in the Travelling Communiqué project is a proof that digitization of the photo material of the Museum of Yugoslav History has a huge potential to draw the attention of the wider audience to the influence of documentary photography on the perception and understanding of historical moments and the way in which these moments get transformed into an image that has become part of collective memory.

A performance by Tarek Elhaik and Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli will be held at the MYH cinema hall as part of the opening of the exhibition.

The accompanying programme of the exhibition is divided into two parts: Summer School to be held  June 11^th – 13^th, aimed at opening collective discussions on the topics covered by the project and Film Programme curated by Miroljub Stojanović, scheduled to take place in the period from June 10^th to August 15^th at the MYH cinema hall. The audience will have an opportunity to see a selection of socially conscious documentaries from Algeria, Indonesia, Egypt, Bolivia, Cuba and India. The film programme does not offer a retrospective of the contribution of certain countries to the global film culture. Instead it has been conceived as a snapshot of the model of behaviour of the film-makers belonging to a whole anticolonial generation that the contemporary audience can identify with.

The project has been produced in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture, and Information  of the Republic of Serbia, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany and Goethe Institut in Belgrade and co-produced by Dutch Art Institute and Netsa Art Village Addis Ababa. The Travelling Communiqué project is carried out with the support of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur-Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, the embassy of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria in Belgrade, the embassy of the Republic of Indonesia in Serbia and the embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt in Serbia.

The exhibition will be open from June 10^th to August 15^th, 2014.

List of project authors:

Armin Linke (Germany/Italy), Doreen Mende (Germany), Milica Tomić (born in SFRY) in permanent discussion with Yero Adugna Eticha (Ethiopia), Kader Attia (Algeria/France), Fabian Bechtle (Germany); Conflicting Identities – ETH Zürich (Switzerland): Philip Ursprung (Switzerland), Marija Marić (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Seraina Renz (Switzerland), Dubravka Sekulić (born in SFRY), Damjan Kokalevski (Macedonia) and Haris Piplas (Bosnia and Herzegovina); Mirjana Dragosavljević (born in SFRY), Tarek Elhaik (Morocco/USA) & Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli (USA), Theo Eshetu (Great Britain/Ethiopia), Kodwo Eshun (Great Britain), Heba Farid (Egypt), Anselm Franke (Germany), Elizabeth W. Giorgis (Ethiopia), Fasil Giorghis (Ethiopia), Jean-Luc Godard (Switzerland) and Anne-Marie Mièville (France), Flaka Haliti (Kosovo), Roza El Hassan (Hungary/Syria), Samia Henni (Switzerland /Algeria), Maja Hodošček (born in SFRY), Pramod Kumar (India), Lopičić + Lopičić architects (Serbia), Mirko Lovrić (Serbia), Olga Manojlović Pintar (Serbia), Fred Moten (USA); research group of the Museum of Yugoslav History: Radovan Cukić (Serbia), Ivan Manojlović (Serbia), Mirjana Slavković (Serbia), Dorja Benussi (Croatia), Ivan Benussi (Serbia); Mark Nash (Great Britain); Netsa Art Village (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia); Helen Zeru Araya (Ethiopia), Tamrat Gezahegn (Ethiopia), Mulugeta Kassa (Ethiopia), Mihret Kebede (Ethiopia) and Tesfahun Kibru (Ethiopia); Garin Nugroho (Indonesia), The Otolith Group (Great Britain), O’Tam Pulto (Ethiopia), Milja Radovanović (born in SFRY), Branimir Stojanović (Serbia), Miroljub Miki Stojanović (born in SFRY); Subversive Films: Mohanad Yaqubi & Reem Shilleh (occupied Palestinian territories), Žiga Testen (Slovenia); Travelling Communiqué at the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem: Jan Adriaans (The Netherlands), Katia Barrett (Great Britain), Hanan Benammar (Algeria/France), Anna Dasović (The Netherlands), Coco Duivenvoorde (The Netherlands), Aziza Harmel (Tunisia), Monique Hendriksen (The Netherlands), Marianna Maruyama (USA/Italy), Celia Eslamieh Shomal (Iran), Aarti Sunder (India), Silvia Ulloa (Spain), Larraitz Torres (Spain) and Laila Torres Mendieta (Mexico); Dejan Vasić (born in SFRY); Jelena Vesić (born in SFRY) & Rachel O’Reilly (Australia), Vanessa Vasić-Janeković (born in SFRY), Françoise Vergès (Réunion) and Jovanka Vojinović (born in SFRY).