COURAGE

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Polish artists and circles involved in performance art were in many ways critical of Polish People's Republic authorities. They would often be involved in the so-called “second circuit” of publishers and galleries that functioned without public support and independently from national institutions. Performers’ actions themselves were also loaded critically not only towards the authoritarian practices of the “people’s” government, but also the patriarchal and hierarchical aspects of Polish culture. 
The Archive of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw presents the history of Polish performance art. It uses an attractive web portal to publish photographic and video recordings of artistic actions along with commentaries from curators. The Archive is also engaged in research and promotion activities, and is participating in the preparation of Museum’s permanent exhibition.

The collection of Society for Queer Memory represents a unique set of daily needs items, printed materials, private funds and oral testimonies capturing the history, memory and everydayness of LGBT/queer people living in Czech milieu. The oldest members of the community are perceived as bearers of a specific historical memory based on their experience of the second half of the 20th century, when they were criminalized and subjected to repression by the state. Thus, the collection focuses also on defensive strategies of “dual life” of this particular social group, both official and private.

Sorin Costina’s private collection is illustrative of the visual art that evaded the official aesthetic canons of the communist regime in Romania. The collection is all the more valuable as the artists represented in it, who were marginal in the last two decades of communism, when ideological control became stricter and stricter, received due recognition both nationally and internationally after 1989.

The "Special Collection" of the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) was established in 1937, and it contains some of the best works of the Ukrainian avant-garde and monumental art. The collection is comprised mostly of paintings and graphics that were considered inappropriate and unacceptable by the regime. They were collected by the secret police over a two-year period from museum in Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv and Poltava and were slated to be destroyed. However, they were preserved secretly in the museum, remaining hidden from the public eye during the Soviet period. Many of the artists represented in the collection were either repressed or executed for “formalism” or “bourgeois nationalism,” and many of their names were undeservedly forgotten until the late 1980s. 

This private collection contains the works of the composer Srđan Hofman, from the late 1960s to the present. Hofman is a representative of post-modernism in music, prominent as a composer of electro-acoustic music in Yugoslavia. Because of the nature of his music, the collection includes different media such as notes on Hofman’s compositions, audio recordings of their performances (both in electronic form and on records and tapes), together with the author’s publications and publications by others on his music. As the collection reflects Hofman’s entire oeuvre, we can trace its beginning from the end of 1960s and witness his continuing creative development.