黑料不打烊

The exhibition Monuments, Plans and Utopias continues the trajectory of Sam Durant鈥檚 long-term work Proposals for Monuments, and represents the latest iteration in a series of projects that address the postcolonial period, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the lives and deaths of monuments, and the intersection of cultural production and the struggle for independence. The work shown at the MSUM is a version of the Nonaligned Echoes: Gifts and Returns exhibition that the artist prepared for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro in September 2024, curated by Natalija Vujo拧evi膰.

For the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, the artist created a model of Park Petrovi膰, the site of the former Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries* in Podgorica. As in his previous works in the series Proposals for Monuments, Durant has created a scale model of a park with trees, roads and buildings. He then selected 25 artworks from the NAM collection, works that depict groups of people engaged in various activities, ranging from fieldwork, dance, and religious gatherings to portrayals of workers鈥� protests and anticolonial struggles. The artist invited visitors to participate in learning, reflecting on, and imagining an alternative world by creating monuments, writing slogans, and learning from past ideas that once envisioned futures different from the one that has materialized. In this way, the exhibition became an active, process-oriented space and collective artwork. By subverting the often intimidating role of monuments, typically erected by those who wield power and thus control the interpretation of history, the work transformed them into blueprints for a better world, conceived and created by ordinary people.

Conceived within the framework of the artist鈥檚 research into the Non-Aligned Movement and its interaction with the collection in Podgorica, the work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova expands as a platform for imagining possible futures by learning from historical lessons, revisiting the concepts of horizontality and solidarity upon which this historical idea was based. In this iteration, the artist has chosen a slightly different conceptual method 鈥� he juxtaposed the scale model of a park with drawings of monuments and photographs of mock-ups from the national collections and the photo archive of the Moderna galerija as an integral part of the work. The selected drawings and photos are sketches and studies by some of the most important Slovenian artists who, after the Second World War, and especially in the 1950s and 1960s, created a large number of monuments on the theme of the anti-fascist struggle, partisan heroes, revolution, and other war-related themes. These monuments, sometimes colloquially referred to as 鈥減artisan monuments鈥� 鈥� monumental sculptures and urban architectural creations 鈥� were built in a variety of styles, from socialist realism to high modernism. They were erected to educate and commemorate, inspired by the national liberation struggle of the peoples of Yugoslavia and linked to the collective experience of the resistance. Unlike the realized monuments, the sketches and studies are conceptually and formally much more abstract and utopian. It is as if the artists were aware that the life of monuments is also limited to a time determined by political realities, and that what is an object of praise in one period can quickly become an object of condemnation and destruction in another. The fate of some monuments in the 1990s, when a change of regime took place in the former common Yugoslav state, is well known; many were heavily damaged or even destroyed. On the other hand, some of these monuments have achieved a different fame, as spomeniks, although these are now sanitized objects, cleansed of any ideological meaning.