You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It

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The exhibition of the project, which has been installed so far in the Historical Museum in Pula, in the MMSU in Rijeka and the Vargas Museum in Manila, focuses on women’s suffering in the political camp on Goli otok and Sv, Grgur.

The author of the project is Andreja Kulunčić in collaboration with Renata Jambrešić Kirin anthropologist and Dubravka Stijačić psychotherapist. The curators of the exhibition are Irena Bekić and Anca Verona Mihulet.

The exhibitions cover different segments of the project. In the interference of documentary and artistic material, through the medium of art installation, the exhibition connects the symbolic and real experience of recognizing female trauma. Combining research into a syncretic medium, it includes and enhances the sensory dimension in the processes of cognition, pointing us to the impermanence, particularity and canonization of knowledge, and builds a sensory historical narrative. All three exhibitions, with their participative part, actively involve visitors in the production of work.

The project has so far been presented in the form of a solo exhibition at the following three museums:

The exhibitions emerged from the project and focus on the transformation of the female body subjected to oppression or trauma. They are designed in such a way as to generate processes that develop as a visitor’s experience, it does not end in the reconstruction of the repression of female inmates, but rhizomatically spreads and branches beyond the space and time of the exhibition, where the memories of the former prisoners are the fragile base for the consolidation of the contested history.

Exhibitions are different, for example in MMSU it was divided into three stations: a space for reflection and complementary thinking that contained visual materials — drawings, photographs and objects — created through artistic research; a place for a gestural interpretation of the daily torture of women on Goli otok and Sveti Grgur in the form of a four-channel installation. Performances at the localities of Annette Giesriegl, Jasna Jovićević and Zrinka Užbinec; and the participation zone, which the artist performed every day through various actions, developed in cooperation with the audience.

With a complex display and accompanying workshops, the exhibition evokes the ideas of camps and anti-monuments, as the embodiment of the political existence of women in the modern age.