The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (MSUB) announced for the fall of 2019 a retrospective exhibition of the world star of the art scene, Marina Abramović, and the agreement on this, as it announced on January 2, was reached with the support of the Government of Serbia, the Ministry of Culture and Information and the Prime Minister of Serbia Ana Brnabić personally.
Marina Abramović's exhibition will be opened in September 2019 and will last until January 2020, which is a kind of return of the artist to Serbia, where she last exhibited independently in 1975, after which she left Belgrade.
Negotiations with Marina Abramović began several months ago, and ended during Prime Minister Ana Brnabić's visit to Norway in November 2017, when her exhibition "The Cleaner" was opened at the "Heni Onstad" Art Center in Oslo. Brnabić and the acting director of MSUB, Slobodan Nakarada, who was in the Prime Minister's delegation because of the negotiations, attended the opening of the retrospective exhibition.
The Prime Minister personally invited Marina Abramović to exhibit in Serbia again, after many years, so that the audience would have the opportunity to get to know her work, the Ministry of Education and Culture stated in a statement.
As a result of the negotiations, the retrospective exhibition "The Cleaner", which will be staged in only seven cities in Europe - after Stockholm, where it was held at the Moderna Museet in February/March 2017, and Copenhagen, Oslo, Bonn, Florence and Torun in Poland, will end at MSUB.
The exhibition includes drawings, paintings and installations created during the entire career of Marina Abramović, including the period of creation in Belgrade, during the 70s of the 20th century.
Brnabić emphasizes that Marina Abramović's exhibition at the Ministry of Education and Culture represents another confirmation of Serbia's new cultural policy.
"Culture is one of the pillars of the development of a successful society, the development of creative thinking, respect and understanding of diversity, and the Government of Serbia will continue to pay special attention to it," Brnabić pointed out, MSUB reported.
Brnabić also assessed that the organization of the Marina Abramović exhibition at the Moscow State University is a message to young artists that they can count on cultural institutions in the country, and not only abroad.
"This is an indicator for our artists that the state has a serious intention to nurture art and culture and to recognize and support quality in contemporary creativity," said Brnabić.
"Cleaner" is, as Nakarada pointed out, "a project of international importance, which will symbolically mark the return of MSUB to the world art scene".
The Acting Director of MSUB also assessed that a similar project has not been organized in Serbia for a long time and that the agreement with one of the world's greatest contemporary artists is a great challenge and a great honor for MSUB.
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