Text:
Andreja Kulunčić’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka
Marijan Špoljar
Marijan Špoljar’s critical review of the exhibition “You betrayed the Party…” for the show Triptych (HRT)
“Triptych” broadcast on April 5, 2022 at 4:03 pm on Croatian radio 3
No matter how conditioned by personal experiences and prerogatives, memories are always subject to mechanisms of social regulation and control. To that extent, their existence or their suppression is the result not only of the individual ability to archive or, in the case of major traumas, the need for amnesia as a defensive method, but directly depends on the nature and goals of the system’s manipulative power.
Political regulation of memory can, of course, also take the form of superficial polishing or retouching, but in its essence, as a way of constructing and maintaining official truth, it is always part of the inviolable right of the rulers to determine, normatively or just implicitly, the subject and area of dominant memory.
Suppressed or forbidden memory, on the other hand, in the space of its illegality, gradually dries up to the limits of the last bearer of the memory or, like any prohibition, expands arterially, often metastasizing into a revengeful climax. In both cases, what was true disappears completely, either by passing into oblivion, or by building the mirage of a myth.
In our recent history, there are more such ruptures, empty places, the contents of which have been erased with ideological, class or state-building rags. Any memory of them was or still is subject to public suspicion, fear or caution that the memory does not endanger the constructed narrative of history. Be that as it may, there are too many such places, and by correcting certain historical injustices and rehabilitating some traumatized participants in that history, they would make epoch-making strides. But, without erecting a monument to every victim, even the smallest one, so that the person rises from oblivion, and their experience is recorded as a commemorative marker, change cannot be achieved not only towards our collective redemption but also towards the confirmation of personal moral duty.
One of those forbidden places and repressed memories is certainly associated with Goli otok: as a locality and term, it existed for a long time only at the level of a general symbol or official political narrative about the Informbiro (Cominform) prisoner camp, while individual destinies remained in the spaces of family memory so that those, over time, they gradually weakened and were lost in oblivion. As the details and personal stories from the larger, male political camp already appeared in the public, media and scientific space in the 1970s, the existence of a smaller political camp on Goli otok and Sveti Grgur intended for women had yet to be announced. While some male detainees presented their testimonies in newspapers, novels and films, women’s experiences were suppressed due to gender, cultural and social values and customs, and they themselves were stigmatized for life. Feeling that complex of questions to be unusually important, but in some way also distinctive, separated from the overall traumatic story of the camp, Andreja Kulunčić started working on the project “You betrayed the Party just when you should have helped it” a few years ago. Before that, there were already several artistic projects that dealt with the fate and condition of the camp, which existed as a political prison from 1949 to 1956, for example the project “Goli otok — new Croatian tourism”, by Damir Čargonja or three-year site-specific actions and artistic and billboard interventions, organized by Darko Bavoljak. In the book that was printed for the duration of the Rijeka as a European City of Culture project, an article about the participation of Andreja Kulunčić was also included, and now, after a smaller exhibition in the Historical Museum in Pula, a separate and comprehensive art exhibition of her research-activist project was held in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka. When we say complete, we mean, of course, the current stage of its realization, since it is constantly being supplemented and in the future includes more and more exhibition spaces, thereby activating new participants not only in the eventual transfer of memories, but even more so in participative-artistic collaboration.
Among a series of organized and ad hoc collaborators, our artistic activist relied mostly on the contributions of feminist anthropologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin and psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić, on three music and dance artists, on critic Irena Bekić and Romanian curator Anca Verona Mihulet, as well as on the organizational and logistical support of associations Goli otok and MAPA.
The phenomenon of Goli otok as a symbol of communist torture is similar in form and content to all camps of totalitarian systems, but it is unique in its contextual determination: it was a camp in the function of de-Stalinization, and it practiced repressive methods that were Stalinist in their distilled form. Of course, the consequences for the prisoners were exactly the same as those in the Stalinist Gulags. It is also likely that the degradation models were copied from an already developed system, which did not prevent certain methods from being perfected here to a monstrous extent. Basic information about the men’s camp on Goli otok has been known for a long time, including the details of the repressive system implemented there. The women’s camp remained a taboo for a long time, and the testimonies of the witnesses were quieter and quieter milled, not only because of the smaller number of prisoners but also because of the specific traumas that women experienced in the perfidious and self-victimizing system of production of both “victims and executioners”. This position is hardly possible to describe and understand so that the women’s camp is seen only as a version of the men’s camp, but if this prison and the methods applied in it are seen as part of a specific policy of crushing and disciplining the female body. Therefore, the entire exhibition project is based on feminist settings, which are specially apostrophized and elaborated by Renata Jambrešić Kirin. According to this, the practice of patriarchal behaviour interpolated into the women’s world of the island — and which is most impressively recognized through the testimony of one of the inmates — is the real measure of the destructive system: the sentence “We are all beaten and we all beat others, the one who beat harder, got out faster” describes, but also explains, how insulting, aggression and beating, according to the model of patriarchal society, is the most effective way to deny oneself and one’s own physical, psychological and moral integrity.
Neuralgic topics of social reality are at the centre of Andreja Kulunčić’s interests. Completely in accordance with her artistic strategy, these themes are unraveled from within to reach those layers that best show the root causes and true nature of hegemonic social practices. In this unfolding, the artist uses all the methods and discursive elements of contemporary artistic procedures, with the regular involvement of a wide circle of versed and interested public, with the use of an elaborate network of various participatory practices and with intensive own research in the field and in available documentation. It is, therefore, about multidisciplinary actions that neither begin with the exhibition, nor end with it. It is the same with the project on Goli otok, that is, with the part that has evolved to the current stage of a complex research and project process. Of course, the current exhibition will also experience changes, and it is planned in such a way as to provide not only an insight into what has been achieved so far, but also to produce a new quantity and quality of information and artistic results.
In a very simplified way, we can say that Andreja Kulunčić’s project branches into two directions: one is dedicated to commemorating and mapping the former island camp reality, and the second part deals with stimulating, implementing and organizing various forms of artistic interventions on the topic of violent transformation of the female body and spirit in situations of exceptional aggression, torture or forced self-destructive actions.
At the exhibition level, the exhibition in Rijeka contains three units, spatially separated, content-differentiated, media and technologically plural and intentionally separated. The first part is filled with more standard forms of drawing, photography and installation, and it memorizes, documents and contemplates the real time of the camp and the current situation on the ground, the second part in the form of a four-channel video-installation documents the dance-music action and the sound performance on the hot stone of the island, while the third section is intended for participatory and activist actions. Of the many parallel and procedural events, perhaps the most intriguing are the actions that take place with the participation of the audience, and refer to the individual writing of the names of 850 camp women and the making of the same number of terracotta figurines.
Through a series of exhibitions, actions, workshops, printing of publications, media interpretations and interventions on Goli island localities, Andreja Kulunčić is building a type of comprehensive public monument. Of course, with the full awareness that her goal is not to build a plastic monument or to impose or octroinate memory, but to do what is otherwise the fundamental reason for her practice of art — to achieve social change.