Andreja Kulunčić: You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It
17. 12. 2024. – 30. 1. 2025.
Anca Poterașu Gallery
26 Popa Soare Street, 023983, Bucharest, Romania
Collaborators: anthropologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin, psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić
Curators: Irena Bekić, Anca Verona Mihuleț
Collaborator for the Romanian edition of the exhibition: Claudia-Florentina Dobre, historian
Coordination and management: Anca Poterașu
Focused on the suffering of more than 850 convicts on the Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur women’s political prison camps in former Yugoslavia during the times of president Josip Broz Tito, this art research project aims to deliver ways of activating memory. The regime in the camps systematically threatened their reproductive health, sense of ethical responsibility and care for others, and excluded their sexual specificities. The convicts were forced to punish, control and interrogate each other, which, along with hard labour, resulted in the deep traumas experienced and the long silence kept by the women. Through artistic spatial interventions at the sites of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, exhibitions, a web site, publication and a series of workshops and talks, the project deconstructs the deliberate amnesia concerning the history of women on Goli Otok to open a passage to memory. In doing so, it reaches for a subversive commemorative form – an anti-monument – which does not impose memory but seeks it in the constantly renewed permeation of disputed memories and the knowledge and feelings of the audience.
The exhibition is centred on the transformation of the female body when subjected to oppression or trauma. The exhibition is divided into two stations: the main spaces of the gallery are constructed as areas for reflection, complementary thinking and participation, containing visual materials – drawings, together with photographs showing some of the outcomes of the artistic research, together with the results of the participatory action developed in collaboration with the public; and the video room, which acts as a site for the gestural interpretation of the daily tortures endured by the women on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur in the form of a moving image installation. Through the set up and the active participation of the audience, the exhibition evokes the ideas of camp and anti-monument as epitomes of the political existence of women throughout modernity. Inside the space of the gallery, the visitor becomes, successively, keeper of memory, participant in the artistic process, and witness of a contingent history.
The exhibition “You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It” is a part of the project (In)Visible Traces. Artistic Memories of the Cold War, initiated by Documenta in Zagreb and organized together with the Romanian Association for Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Blockfrei, Vienna and The Bautzner Straße Dresden Memorial, Dresden. The project aims to engage artists, researchers, educators, policymakers, and citizens in reflecting, preserving and discussing European cultural heritage, focusing on neglected Cold War-era historical sites.
Andreja Kulunčić: You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It / Collaborators: anthropologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin, psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić, historian Claudia-Florentina Dobre / Curators: Irena Bekić, Anca Mihuleț / Coordination and management: Anca Poterașu / Project manager: Camelia Ducaru / Production: Rafaela Bîrlădeanu / Translator: Iris Rusu / Graphic design: Andrei Sendrea / Reg
