COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

Gordana Vnuk's personal collection contains published and documentary materials about the festival of new theatre Eurokaz, the theatre company Coccolemocco, the international theatre festivals Young People’s Theatre Days and Young People’s Theatre Days of Dubrovnik and the The Society of Amateurs in Culture and Arts Vinko Jeđut at which premises the company was working for some time under the pretext of being its theatre section. Coccolemocco, as a part of independent cultural scene, introduced new elements to the performing arts and a new type of theatre into Croatian and Yugoslav society. Through their selection of themes, the young theatre zealots inaugurated and discussed issues pertaining to Yugoslav leftist practices, relying on the utopian ardour of their generation who chose theatre as a possible mode of responsible and open action along the lines of Brecht and his dialectical method. Such an attitude ultimately lead to negative criticisms from a part of the professional mainstream community.

The private collection contains materials documenting the celebration of the Grand Jubilee, when 100,000 pilgrims gathered in Solin in Dalmatia on 12 September 1976. The Grand Jubilee celebrated the thirteen centuries of the first contacts of the Croats with the Holy See and 1,000 years of the construction of the first known Croatian Marian shrine. By commemorating the Croatian Catholic medieval rulers and statehood, the Church articulated a collective identity rooted in the past and tradition. As such, it was inherently opposed to the socialist imagery offered by the Yugoslav state. Some Communist Party members saw in the massive mobilisation of believers the “escalation of nationalism” as a follow-up to the Croatian Spring.

The Grgo Šore Goli Otok Collection is part of a broader collection consisting of documents from personal and family bequests and is kept in the Croatian History Museum. The collection includes documentation about Goli otok (a small rocky island in the Adriatic Sea), official correspondence, newspapers and photographs. In his manuscripts, Grgo Šore described in detail all of the horrors he experienced on Goli otok during his captivity as a falsely accused “Cominformist.” Particularly noteworthy are the drawings depicting the brutal treatment of inmates by the prison guards.

The informal group of the Six Artists consisted of Raša Todosijević, Era Milivojević, Marina Abramović, Zoran Popović, Neša Paripović and Gergelj Urkom. The work of these artists began with the establishment of the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade in 1971. It lasted to 1973, when each of them started working independently. Their artistic activity was above all a resistance to the existing practice that was being taught in the framework of school programs at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. They advocated the establishment of a modern approach to the reconstruction and functioning of artistic institutions, as well as to redefining the effects of art. The accent started to be set on the artist as a subject and to his authorial speech, "speech in the first place". The artists began to introduce new media into art (installation, bodybuilding, photography, film, text ...).

The private collection of historian Gábor Klaniczay (1950-) includes written, visual, and audio sources from the 1970s and 1980s. These sources all concern the alternative, underground cultural trends, art, music performances, and political oppositional movements of the period. The almost entire series of the samizdat publications from Hungary also constitute an important part of the collection, as do the leaflets and posters from his trips to Paris and New York.