THE PILGRIMAGE IN THE MUSEUM OF YUGOSLAVIA

The Pilgrimage exhibition authored by Ana Miljački, realized in collaboration with the Critical Broadcasting Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, opens in the Museum of Yugoslavia on June 24 at 6.00 p.m.

The exhibition focuses on memories of collective school visits to NOB monuments in Yugoslavia, collected from private and historical archives. Nine selected monuments, including the monument in the Šumarice Memorial Park, the Monument to the Battle of Sutjeska, the Stone Flower dedicated to the victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp, the Monument to the Revolution on Kozara, The Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar, the Monument on Petrova Gora, the Monument to the Ilinden Uprising in Kruševo, the Monument in Ilirska Bistrica, as well as the Monument to the Fallen Fighters in Barutana, are just a sample of the collected material. These monuments, created by some of the most prominent Yugoslav sculptors and architects such as Miodrag Živković, Bogdan Bogdanović, Dušan Džamonja, Ranko Radović, Vojin Bakić and Kana Radević, have been selected on the assumption that they had been visited by Yugoslav youth until 1991, and therefore resonate most with the values ​​of anti-fascism and “brotherhood and unity”.

Video installation The Pilgrimage has emerged from the author’s personal response to the vandalism of the Partisan Cemetery in Mostar on June 15, 2022.

The exhibition in the Museum of Yugoslavia has been realized in the form of a six-channel video installation, accompanied by a nonlinear documentary soundscape.

By means of artificial intelligence and “machine learning,” The Pilgrimage produces a synthetic memory of those visits and offers space for a new, collective experience, while at the same time articulating a contemporary political and activist position grounded on the values ​​of anti-fascism, unity, and solidarity, which are necessary even today. As the author states: “the videos in The Pilgrimage are simultaneously historically grounded and imaginary”.

The team of authors, in addition to Ana Miljački, consists of Ous Abou Ras, Pavle Dinulović and Julian Geltman, while the exhibition curators are Simona Ognjanović and Marija Đorgović from the Museum of Yugoslavia. The preparation and research phase of the art project was supported by numerous researchers and associates, including Melika Konjičanin, Ana Martina Bakić, Jelica Jovanović – Group of Architects, Andrew Lawler, Sandro Đukić, CCN Images, Other Tomorrows. The first version of The Pilgrimage exhibition was shown in Venice in 2023, and the second at the Timişoara Architecture Biennale in 2024.

Ana Miljački is a curator, theorist, historian, and professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA. Miljački is the head of the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT, which produces critical exhibitions about architecture in various media. She is the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle (Routledge 2018). She has recently edited a special issue of the journal LOG: Coauthoring (2022), as well as JAE: Pedagogies for a Broken World. She was among the three-member curatorial team of the American Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014 with the project: OfficeUS. The most recent series of her scholarly and polemical works deals with collective authorship and copyright, the status of copies, as well as the affective history of Yugoslav architecture. 

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