As part of the tenth Montenegrin film festival on human rights "Ubrzaj 2019", today in the hall of the Studio scene in the Montenegrin National Theater, Hrvoj Polan's exhibition "Behind seven camps: From the crime of culture to the culture of crime" was opened.
The photographs on display were created as part of the research, the result of which is the photo-monograph "Behind seven camps: From the crime of culture to the culture of crime", signed by the writer and journalist Viktor Ivančić and journalist Nemanja Stjepanović along with Polan, published by the ZFD Belgrade forum organization.
Nataša Govedarica, program director of the ZfD Forum, and Miloš Vukanović, historian and adviser at the Center for Civic Education, spoke at the opening of the exhibition.
"Hrvoj Polan's photographs show cultural centers transformed during the wars of the XNUMXs into places of torture and crime as they look today. On none of them - if they are located on the territory of the countries that 'delegated' camp guards and criminals - there are no signs about the victims and their suffering. Thus, only seemingly paradoxically, all national collectivities, which were ready to shed rivers of blood, in order not to emphasize (and very often invent) mutual cultural differences, eventually abolished all peculiarities by nurturing a unique and unified, so to speak, common culture of denial. , said Govedarica at the opening of the exhibition.
According to her, the photo-monograph focuses on the relationship between culture and violence, that is, between the construct of national culture and nationally motivated violence.
"Although the reasons for these conversions, which turned the houses of culture into houses of crime, are actually prosaic, often purely logistical, the authors, combining a photographic, factual and essayistic approach, tried to emphasize the symbolic weight of such a practice and shed light on its ideological background," she pointed out.
After her, the historian and adviser at the Center for Civic Education, Miloš Vukanović, addressed the audience.
"We live in a world of recent wars, we live in states that were founded on their foundation, and we will never free ourselves from the shackles that those wars created. Those wars brought many victims and human suffering, but also a lot of destruction of cultural assets. The two most recognizable in our environment are the destruction of the bridge in Mostar and the shelling of Dubrovnik, which remains one of the biggest stains on our own past," he said.
"But as we can see with this exhibition, the destruction of culture is not only the physical destruction of cultural assets, but also the destruction of the significance of cultural centers that were the beautiful significance of that Yugoslavia. A Yugoslavia that recognized and invested incredible resources in the cultural uplifting of its population," added Vukanović.
"Exhibitions like this are there to remind us of the unpleasant truth and to help prevent bad things from the past from happening again. By pointing out that a crime took place at a cultural site, we will not diminish the importance of that site in terms of cultural and touristic valorization, and we will additionally contribute to the construction of a culture of memory," emphasized Vukanović.
The exhibition was produced by the organizations forum ZFD Belgrade and PAX Holland, and the Podgorica exhibition is the result of cooperation between the Center for Civic Education and forumZFD. It was previously installed in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Sarajevo, Rijeka, Prijedor, Šibenik and The Hague, while Poreč Annale presented four selected photographs as part of a collective exhibition.
The exhibition at CNP will be open during the Montenegrin human rights film festival "Acceleration", and admission is free.
Bonus video:
