A bridge of a hundred works: MSUB announces the exhibition arriving from Lyon in May
After its January residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, the exhibition built on the MSUB permanent collection returns home at the end of May, with a hundred works coming back to Belgrade after being seen by nearly fifty thousand visitors in France.
When in January at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon the exhibition Neighbourhoods: Sixty Years of Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Art opened, on the first weekend the rooms of the old macLYON, spread across several levels of a former manufactory complex in the Vaise district, drew nearly five thousand visitors. For a topic that from a French perspective is not recognised as central and is historically treated as marginal, the figure immediately signalled the success of the curatorial concept. Nikola Dedic and Helene Hammond, the authors of the exhibition on the Serbian and French sides, set out one hundred works that had travelled from the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade to Lyon, and that now, at the end of May, return to Belgrade for an opening in the glass gallery by the confluence.
The curatorial concept works on the relationship between the individual and the community, a thematic axis that in Yugoslav art of the 1960s and 1970s was not clearly articulated but, in retrospect, can be seen as a shared frame for groups such as OHO from Slovenia, KOD and Bosch+Bosch from Vojvodina, or the neo-avant-garde circle around the Belgrade SKC. The exhibition does not read this generation of artists as merely politically inspired but places them within a frame of the search for new relationships between artistic practice and broader social dynamics. Among the hundred works coming to Belgrade are pieces by Marina Abramovic, Mrdjan Bajic, Milan Aleksic, Sasa Tkacenko, Bora Iljovski, Branka Borcic, Rasa Todosijevic, Era Milivojevic and many others.
What the exchange with macLYON means
The cooperation between MSUB and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon did not begin this season. The initial exchange was agreed in 2022 as part of the French-Serbian cultural programme Belgrade Saison, which the French Ministry of Culture funded with over one million euros. In its first phase, the Lyon side in 2023 introduced French audiences to a corpus of works from the Belgrade permanent collection with the exhibition Yougoslavies imaginees, in a thematically fragmentary frame. The current Neighbourhoods exhibition is a more systematic continuation, with a curatorial apparatus that in Lyon worked with a two-hundred-page catalogue, bilingual in Serbian and French, with essays by Dedic, Hammond and an accompanying text by the art historian Branislav Dimitrijevic.
Marina Abramovic appears in this exhibition with three works from the MSUB permanent collection, including Rhythm 10 of 1973, the first performance of her work with knives, which the gallery has conserved in the permanent collection as integral video documentation, The Lovers, The Great Wall Walk of 1988, the documentary section about her walk with Ulay from each end of the Great Wall of China to the meeting in the middle, and a work from her grafted period of the 2000s. Abramovic herself will not be at the opening, but the organisers have announced a video conference with her in the first week of the exhibition.
The question of the permanent collection and its visibility
The MSUB permanent collection, numbering over eight thousand works, is an institutional resource that has over the past decade been largely outside the focus of cultural public discussion. The reason is partly the fact that the main museum building at the confluence of the Sava, the project of Ivan Antic and Ivanka Raspopovic from 1965, was closed from 2007 to 2017 for reconstruction, which for a generation of curators, critics and visitors meant practically no access to the permanent display. Since the building reopened, the permanent display has been carefully reconstructed, but exhibitions that explicitly promote the collection outside Belgrade have been rare.
This year’s cooperation with Lyon is in that sense a signal that MSUB is strategically turning to the international circulation of its collection, a politically and financially risky move. Sending works abroad means insurance, transport and climate control, costs paid by the French side, but the domestic institution must guarantee the works’ return in the same condition. That the exchange was nonetheless agreed speaks to a certain institutional maturity that is not universally standard in Serbian museums. MSUB director Slavica Maletic, who negotiated the exchange personally, said in an interview before the January premiere in Lyon that “the international circulation of the permanent collection is the only way for it to be recognised as part of global art history, not a local repository”.
The exhibition opens in Belgrade at the end of May at the MSUB gallery on the confluence, with tickets at 400 dinars for adults and 200 dinars for students, running until mid-September. For those following the domestic scene, this is probably the season’s most important exhibition, not because of the media noise but because of the curatorial seriousness running through it. The MSUB permanent collection, seen as a whole, remains one of the most important resources for understanding Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav art, and this exhibition shows why.
