When we opened the Sad Songs of War exhibition, the first of several under the same Collection as a Verb moniker, we presented it in a space that had stood empty for three years, i.e. ever since the removal of the first permanent exhibit in the new building. It was necessary to immediately present to the public at least a portion of the unique collection with an international reputation and including the most important artists and art collectives from the post-Yugoslav region and beyond.
We decided to use this opportunity to re-evaluate the role museums have in a time characterised by the migration and climate crises, the pandemic, earthquake in Croatia, the war in Europe, and everything else that is sure to follow. We said that a museum of contemporary art needs to also be a place of solidarity and care for our fellow man, to always aim for the greater good, to articulate and strengthen social values based on the experience of a community.

If a museum is to fulfil this mission, it needs to gain the trust of the community – to collaborate with people of various professions and social statuses, because they are the ones who share with it tasks that are traditionally entrusted solely to experts. The “Collection as a Verb” project began with three themed exhibitions connected to issues currently experienced in our local, and wider international area. The topic of the first exhibition, titled Sad Songs of War, was prompted by the war in Ukraine; the second exhibition, Comradeship, was a response to the acute absence of solidarity in modern society; while the third exhibition, Future, planned for 2023, will be aimed at suggesting how to move forward with the help of art, consisting of various concepts of the future. The project will continue next year as well through a series of smaller exhibitions and interventions, which will give substance to the question of the subject of a collection as a “verb”. Who can be invited to work on creating the collection? We have invited artists, curators, activists, various organisations and neighbours, whom we have named our “triggers” so as to emphasise the end of an era as a prerequisite for a new one, still respecting the previously acquired experiences.

The international conference “Collection as a Verb” will ask how to present works from the collections so as to create a narrative which could connect the society’s experiences from the past with the current needs of today’s society. We will contrast all of these questions with the dominant concept of permanent exhibits of collections which assumes that there is a canon for developing art. Every canon presents itself as universal, permanent, the one applicable to all places and times. The word “verb” denotes that there is somebody responsible for an action, an individual, a collective or a community, which excludes the possibility for universality, at least in our case. It suggests that exhibitions from collections need to be porous, i.e. they need to leave space for a living, particular societal experience, which means that they are not permanent, but that they need to be changeable.

We are witnessing a change in the historical paradigm of museums as archives of artwork, as they are turning into institutions that are actively developing their socio-political context. Moreover, there is the question of the changes in the role of the curator throughout all of these processes. One of the main questions to be answered at the conference is how to set up a curated exhibition of works from the museum’s collections without intrusion from experts, i.e. how to re-imagine expertise and ethics of museums at intersections shaped by historical development of museums and art, and through different voices of the modern society.

Speakers: Anonymous, associate, Kunsthistorisches Mausoleum, Belgrade; Zdenka Badovinac, director, Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art; [BLOK], curatorial collective, Zagreb; Charles Esche, director, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Renata Filčić, curator, Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art; Mira Gaćina, director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje; Jasna Jakšić, senior curator, manager of the Documentation and Information Department and the Library, Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art; Ana Janevski, curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bojana Piškur, museum advisor, Moderna galerija plus Muzej sodobne umetnosti Metelkova, Ljubljana; Agnieszka Tarasiuk-Sutryk, curator, manager of the Collections and Archive Department, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw; Mabel Tapia, deputy artistic director, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Leila Topić, senior curator, Head of Media Art Collection and Photography, Film and Video Collection, Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art; Natalija Vujošević, curator, Centar savremene umjetnosti Crne Gore, Podgorica.

SCHEDULE
09.30 – 10.00 registration

Panel 1 – The porosity of curating
10.00 – 10.10 welcoming speech
10.10 – 10.30 Leila Topić: Meet my shadow curator – creating community through situated learning
10.30 – 10.50 Renata Filčić: MSU Friends
10.50 – 11.10 Jasna Jakšić: The porosity of a curator’s work and MSU’s archival material
11.10 – 11.30 Dunja Kučinac and Ana Kutleša [BLOK]: Trešnjevka Neighbourhood Museum – building from the bottom up
11.30 – 12.00 moderated discussion

12.00 – 12.20 coffee break

Panel 2 – Museum of solidarity
12.20 – 12.40 Mira Gaćina: Solidarity, virtue of the 21st century
12.40 – 13.00 Natalija Vujošević: How did a pond swallow the ocean? The Non-Aligned Art Collection Laboratory
13.00 – 13.20 Bojana Piškur: Southern Constellations – how to continue, what is to be done, and some other dilemmas
13.20 – 13.50 moderated discussion

13.50 – 15.00 lunch break

Panel 3 – Questioning the concept of permanent collections
15.00 – 15.20 Zdenka Badovinac: Collection as a Verb
15.20 – 15.40 Charles Esche: The Demodernising Possibility
15.40 – 16.00 Mabel Tapia: Communicating Vessels. Strategies for Rethinking a Reina Sofía Museum Collection
16.00 – 16.20 Ana Janevski: From "Scenes to a New Heritage" to "Change is Modern" − collection’s display strategies at the Museum of Modern Art
16.20 – 16.40 Agnieszka Tarasiuk: Collection at the stage of adolescence
16.40 – 17.00 Anonymous: Remembering Modernity (by reinventing Wunderkammer)
17.00 – 17.30 moderated discussion

moderators: Vesna Meštrić, Ana Škegro
organization: Zdenka Badovinac, Ana Škegro

The conference will be available to follow live via a link: https://www.facebook.com/events/679861386910108?ref=newsfeed