Exhibition: Gifts and Residencies

Gallery: The palace complex at Kruševac, Petrović Castle, The House of the King’s Guard, Botanical Garden, Park of MCAM

Duration:: From October 16, 2023.

The exhibition “Gifts and Residencies” will be opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro on Monday, October 16 at 7 PM. The display consists of gifts and works created during the residential stays of artists in the period of the Gallery of Art of Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito” and the Center for Contemporary Art of Montenegro, as well as works that are the result of recent program initiatives aimed at improving international cooperation and engaging in the essential flows of contemporary museum practice. Clearly profiled in this domain, the newly constituted Museum is indeed focused on collecting works of contemporary art.

The exhibition consists of 90 works of art (paintings, sculptures, graphics, reliefs, embroideries, instruments) originating from numerous countries – Zimbabwe, Mexico, India, Burma, Cambodia, Korea, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Uganda, Tanzania, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Iraq, Syria, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Malta, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Kosovo, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Spain, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, Peru, and Guyana and will be presented to the public in the palace complex at Kruševac, in the galleries of Petrović Castle, The House of the King’s Guard, Botanical Garden, as well as in the park itself.

The museum advisor and exhibition curator, Marina Čelebić, among other things, wrote the following in the catalog accompanying the exhibition:

“The exhibition titled ‘Gifts and Residencies’ presents a comprehensive overview of the process of forming the museum’s collection over a certain period. In this context, it illustrates the process of its creation within the institution by tracking two key phases – the period of the Gallery of Art of Non-Aligned Countries ‘Josip Broz Tito’ (1984–1995) and the period of the Center for Contemporary Art of Montenegro (1995–2023). The last period includes the transformation of the institution into the Museum of Contemporary Art, which inherits the mentioned collection and is based on it. Comprising over 1000 exhibits from 61 countries, with a foundation predominantly made up of the collection of non-aligned countries, this rich collection is a special feature of the Museum.

By retrospectively examining up to the present day, the exhibition ‘Gifts and Residencies’ marks the beginning of the new institutional form – the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro.”

At the opening of the exhibition, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, Dr. Vladislav Šćepanović, and the exhibition curator, Marina Čelebić, will speak, and the exhibition will be opened by the Minister of Culture and Media, Maša Vlaović, MA.