COURAGE

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The Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina (MSUV) was founded in 1966 and maintains a research museum approach to the preservation, exhibition and presentation of works of contemporary art of the second half of the 20th and the 21^st century, linking the local with the international art scene. Art collections of paintings, sculptures, objects and installations, prints and drawings, conceptual art, film, video and photography, ‘intermedia’ and digital works, architecture, urban planning and design from the late 20th and the early 21st century of Vojvodina, Serbia, as well as the works of foreign artists and art groups can be found in the museum’s collection. In addition, the museum collects, systematizes and preserves a rich library and documentary/archival material on all the main players and phenomena relevant to the history of art in Vojvodina. The MSUV aims to systematically study and reevaluate the history of art of the late 20th and 21st century in Vojvodina, in Serbia and throughout the former Yugoslav region through numerous study, problem-solving, retrospective and monographic projects. It promotes what it considers to be important historical artistic phenomena and personalities through new approaches and methods, while continuously working to educate the public. The task of the museum is to note artistic approaches which have been seriously engaged with, and marginal or alternative courses of art history, at the same time encouraging contemporary production and practice by promoting artists through thematic and solo exhibitions, actions, spoken word programs, workshops, film screenings, music events, etc., intended for professionals and the general public.

The Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art, the forerunner of the Museum of Contemporary Art, was founded in Zagreb on 21 December 1954. It consisted of the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Centre for Photography, Film and Television, the Benko Horvat Collection and the Library and Documentation Department, and it also included Meštrović Atelier, the Primitive Art Gallery and the Jozo Kljaković Collection until the latter became independent. The aim of the gallery is to document and promote contemporary art. The gallery was located in Count Kulmer's baroque palace in Zagreb’s Upper Town. Due to the modest conditions of the location, the Museum never had a permanent collection, and it performed its museum-gallery and educational activities by organizing thematic and monographic exhibitions of Croatian and foreign artists. The decision to construct a new museum building was enacted in 1998, and the museum moved to its new premises in 2009.

The cultural role of the institution in the socialist era consisted primarily of the promotion and affirmation of contemporary artists and the preservation of their works. It is the work of the documentation section that resulted in the emergence of the eleven collections that the museum now owns: Collection of Drawings, Graphics, Prints and Art on Paper, Film and Video Collection, Photography Collection, Media Art Collection, Sculpture Collection, Collection of Paintings, the Tošo Dabac Archive, the Kožarić Studio, the Seissel Donation, the Richter Collection and the Benko Horvat Collection. Most of the works from the Museum of Contemporary Art were created in the period of socialism, and some of them are by artists who were active in the cultural opposition.

Modelled on Soviet literary museums, the Museum of Czech Literature was established after the government’s decision regarding the premises of the Strahov Monastery in 1953. Besides the preparation of long-term and temporary exhibitions with literary themes, the museum administrated and expanded literary archives, a library and an art collection. Parts of these collections were returned to their original owners in the early 1990s, but the museum was able to justify its continued existence and it now administrates approximately 12% of the national cultural heritage stored in Czech memory institutions. The Museum concentrates on gathering, processing, preserving, researching, and exhibiting sources – paper documents, books, and visual arts – related to the history of literature, literary culture, and the cultural history of the Czech territory from the last third of the eighteenth century to today.

The Artpool Art Research Center was founded as an art initiative by György Galántai and Julia Klaniczay in 1979 (after 10 years of illegal and 25 years of non-profit existence). Since 2015, it has been part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, allowing the center to work as a separate unit in a well-established environment, with more researchers and a broader scope of operation. According to plans, the collection developed by Galántai and Klaniczay will form part of the Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI), to be set up within the framework of the Liget Budapest Project in the National Museum Restoration and Storage Center (OMRRK) in 2019. The earliest section of the Artpool collection, created between 1965 and 1991, entered state ownership thanks to the Hungarian National Bank’s (MNB) Depository Program. The material accumulated since 1992 was gifted by the founders to the Museum.

The collection of the Artpool Art Research Center documents the history of art movements, trends, and tendencies which emerged beginning in the 1960s, including what is termed unofficial artistic trends (underground, samizdat). The archives’ 650 running meters and 2,300 hours of digitalized materials allow research on some 7,500 artists, art groups, and institutes, extending to virtually every branch of the fine and applied arts. The collection represents a staggering spectrum with an astounding number of artists. Thanks to the documents and works it preserves, Artpool is an ideal place for research, providing insights into the intellectual developments of an era. The Artpool archives is a treasure trove of letters, descriptions of artworks, notes, sketches, concepts, interviews, various writings and works, photo-documentation, catalogues, invitations, posters, bibliographies, chronologies, monographs, periodicals, diagrams, portfolios, and video and audio documents. The diverse material makes research into a wide range of art forms possible, including Fluxus, concept art, performance art, visual and concrete poetry, sound poetry, artists’ bookworks, mail art, artistamp, artists’ postcards, artists’ periodicals, copy art, computer art, video art and ‘public art’, supplemented by documentation about the oeuvres of Sándor Altorjai, Miklós Erdély, György Galántai, Endre Tót, Ben Vautier, G. A. Cavellini, Ray Johnson and Monty Cantsin, among others, only researchable in Hungary in the Artpool archives.

Artpool has had a long-standing mission to connect Hungarian culture with the international art scene and to document the activities of artists in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe who were placed in marginal positions by official cultural institutions before 1989. In addition to being one of the most important records of non-conformist art practices in Eastern Europe (with documents concerning the progressive, non-official Hungarian art tendencies beginning in the 1970s and the Hungarian samizdat art of the  1970s, and 1980s, including alternative art scenes and groups, contemporary music, underground art magazines, etc.), the archive has a unique collection on international art tendencies and movements from the 1960s on, and it helps further the work of researchers from around the world.