TWO NEW EXHIBITIONS IN THE RENOVATED MAY 25 MUSEUM

The May 25 Museum, one of four buildings which are part of the Museum of Yugoslavia’s complex, will be newly opened to the public in December 2019. The renovated space will showcase two exhibitions: The Nineties: A Glossary of Migrations, the result of research conducted by this Museum’s team of curators, and Project Yugoslavia, an example of the good cooperation the Museum nurtures with independent art platforms.

The Nineties: A Glossary of Migrations exhibition, which will open on December 5, 2019, has gathered over thirty contemporary artists, as well as art and activist collectives dealing with the subject of mass population migrations to and from Serbia during the 1990s.

“The primary aim of the exhibition is to map different forms of engagement from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition’s primary focus is the way different social, cultural, political and legal problems created in these extremely complex and traumatic migratory processes, were addressed in the field of art; the documentary-historiography dimension is placed in the background. Besides the artistic positions, the exhibition also includes individual initiatives and organizations from the spheres of activism and the civil sector, however, primarily those initiated by artists or those involving collaboration with contemporary artists,” – the exhibition curators Simona Ognjanović and Ana Panić from the Museum of Yugoslavia explain.

Project Yugoslavia is the collaborative work of Kiosk – The Platform for Contemporary Art and the Museum of Yugoslavia. The exhibition, which will open on December 17, 2019, offers videos of 100 interviews with people of different ages and profiles from all the countries that came into being with the breakup of Yugoslavia. In place of actual questions, the project’s authors gave each participant one object identification card from the Museum of Yugoslavia’s collections, seeking information such as description, date or period, origin.

“By doing so we tried to indirectly translate the collection of material traces of the past into the form of live commentary, current judgments, ideas and potentials for the future,” – emphasize Ana Adamović and Milica Pekić from the Platform for Contemporary Art – Kiosk.

This is the first time since the opening of the May 25 Museum that serious infrastructural works on the building have been undertaken. All adaptations were made using adequate materials and in compliance with the original project of the architect Mihailo Mika Janković.

Since the renovation started, a Visitors Center has been made available to the public, as part of the Museum of Yugoslavia complex. It consists of a bookstore, café and gift shop. Also, the sculpture Bird by the famous Yugoslav sculptor Vojin Bakić, has been placed in the museum park.

The May 25 Museum was built in 1962 in the modernist style, as one of the first planned museum buildings in Belgrade. It is a rare example of total design in Belgrade architecture with equal attention devoted to the building’s exterior representational appearance and the interior’s modern design.