Andreja Kulunčić: You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It *
January 6 – March 19, 2023
Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines
Jorge B. Vargas Museum & Filipiniana Research Center
University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, the Philippines
* (statement of one of the wardens of the Goli Otok camp)
Collaborators: anthropologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin, psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić
Curators: Irena Bekić, Anca Verona Mihuleț
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 space of the gallery is constructed as an area for reflection, complementary thinking and participation, containing visual materials – simulacra of 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 museum, the visitor becomes, successively, keeper of memory, participant in the artistic process, and witness of a contingent history.
The exhibition in Manila was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Republic of the Philippines.
Andreja Kulunčić / You betrayed the party just when you should have helped it // collaborators: Renata Jambrešić Kirin and Dubravka Stijačić//curators: Irena Bekić and Anca Verona Mihuleț// curator, UP Vargas Museum: Tessa Maria Gauzon //coordinator, UP Vargas Museum : Kara De Guzman// coordinator, National Commission for Culture and Art: Jeanne Severo // sound: Hrvoje Nikšić// photography: Darko Bavoljak, Sanja Bistričić Srića, Andreja Kulunčić, Ivo Martinović // video: Darko Bavoljak, Ivo Martinović // editing: Maida Srabović // print photography: Ivan Kuharić, Fini print // design: Gian Delgado // Cover photo: Sanja Bistričić Srića// Production: MAPA, Zagreb, 2023.
About the Museum: https://www.vargasmuseum.org/
