Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

Our Sarajevo exhibition is unfortunately already over. If you got the chance to see it, feel free to let us know your thoughts. But until then, here is our interview with curator Ivana Udovičić from the National Gallery!  

When our Sarajevo exhibition was just about to open two weeks ago, Bosnia was struck with natural disaster. Most of the Balkan countries suffered from enormous flooding and our colleagues at the National Gallery in Sarajevo ran down to the basement every five minutes to check whether the art works stored there had been damaged. (And fortunately they had not).

Amidst all this incessant rain, fear of water damage and the installation of the exhibition the two curators of our exhibition still found the time to talk to us. These interviews were maybe the most difficult and most enlightening ones: In none of our other exhibition venues had people experienced and were influenced by war this directly in their youth and had to deal with the consequences up to now.

We tried to shorten the interviews but could not bring ourselves to actually do it. Interesting, fascinating, although a long read is what you will find starting with Maja Abdomerović. 

Encountering problems and fixing them during an exhibition in the making is something probably every curator knows. But what to do when the curator of the exhibition cannot be there? The answer to this question is how we met Lizzie Calligas. She is one of the many and crucial helping hands of our Thessaloniki exhibition.

Since artistic director Denys Zacharopoulos could not be there for the installation of the exhibition, Lizzie, as a close friend, took approximately 700 pictures in order to show them to him. Every night she visited him and came back in the morning with his notes to pass them on to curators Maro and Alexios.

But Lizzie herself is also an artist and so naturally we had a few questions for her.  

Greece is one of the European countries hit the hardest by the ongoing economic crisis. With co-curator Maro Psyrra we talked about the consequences of the crisis for the exhibition, the staff and the museum. On a lighter note we also chatted about her PhD, her favorite artists and one of her favorite pieces: an installation by Leda Papaconstantinou called ‘Genet’s Toaster’.  

More often than not, when people become really enthusiastic about something and they make it their passion and pursue this passion professionally, they can remember one moment in which all of that became clear to them.

For Alexios this moment was when he encountered Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ on the cover of a book. He was twelve or thirteen at the moment and remembers that that was the moment in which he decided he wanted to be in the arts professionally. As a professional viewer. For him ‘it was a funny coincidence that Duchamp’s last work was Étant donnés: 1 la chute d'eau / 2 le gaz d'éclairage’ - a work on viewing and voyeurism.