The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade from Ideological Space to Desired Place: Producing the Art History Narrative of Yugoslav Modern Art

Abstract

This paper critically discusses the foundation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (MoCAB), the reinvention of Yugoslav modern art and the writing of the history of Yugoslav modern art as equally important and interdependent challenges in the construction of the post-revolutionary universe. Referring to De Certeau's theoretical concepts of place and space, it investigates the ideological and socio-political context and circumstances that preceded the opening of the MoCAB, and critically analyses how they influenced the conceptualization of this institution, as well as how they might have reflected on the very processes of producing the art history narrative of Yugoslav modern art through the MoCAB's exhibitions and research projects. The place (le lieu) is New Belgrade: at the time that the first competition for the design of the Modern Gallery (later renamed the MoCAB) was announced, the uninhabited and mainly swampy and sandy area on the left bank of the Sava. This area had been a symbolically empty area, and therefore it had been recognized as an ideal territory for the constructing of an administrative center of the new socialist and federative state. The Modern Gallery/MoCAB had been conceived and developed following the given political and ideological trajectories; more precisely, the Modern Gallery/MoCAB occurred as the effect produced by the ideology that was represented by New Belgrade and therefore it could be possible to speculate on MoCAB as a 'spatial practice' (l'espace/'lieu pratique').