Exhibition: Spiritual Decolonization
Gallery: Botanical Garden
Duration: September 5 – October 5,2023.

The exhibition “Spiritual Decolonization” by the Laboratory of Art Collections of Non-Aligned Countries, a project of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, in collaboration with Ana Hoffner Prvulović, has been open to the public since September 5 in the Botanical Garden gallery.

“Spiritual Decolonization” intertwines documents that guide us through the once layered relationships between Yugoslavia and India. Through different time frames and contexts, from the India Week event held in the first half of September 1985 to the lecture by Vida Tomšić, presented on November 8, 1985, in New Delhi, organized by ICSSR (Indian Council of Social Science Research), and to the visit of artist Ana Hoffner Prvulović to Podgorica in 2021 and her discussions with the curators of the Non-Aligned Collection (Marina Čelebić, Anita Ćulafić, Nada Baković, and Brankica Nedović) for the purpose of researching and producing the film Spiritual Decolonization, later presented at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022/23 in India. Through the complex interweaving of historical documents, events, encounters, and memories, the exhibition reflects on the legacy and potential of ideas that have developed in various layers and intensities through the Non-Aligned Movement, emphasizing the empowerment of women, decolonization, and deperipheralization, while highlighting the prominent role that culture and cultural exchange have played in these processes. The title of the exhibition is parallel to the title of the work by Ana Hoffner ex Prvulović and was taken from the publication Pride and Obligation (Gallery of Art of Non-Aligned Countries Josip Broz Tito, 1982). During its duration, the exhibition will be accompanied by a series of activities such as guided tours, lectures, and workshops, and the public will be informed about them in a timely manner.

Ana Hoffner Prvulović is an artist, researcher, and writer. Her practice operates within and around contemporary art, art history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She is interested in questions of queer identity, manifestations of global capital, coloniality and the East, forms of escape, early psychoanalysis, as well as the politics of memory and war. Hoffner works with video, photography, installation, and performance. She uses techniques of appropriation such as restaging photographs, interviews, and reports, seeking ways to desynchronize the normative affiliations of body and voice, sound, and image. She openly opposes the current dominance of corporate aesthetics, images of disgust and fear, and right-wing establishment by insisting on analysis, contextualization, and reflection. Hoffner aims to introduce temporalities, relations, and spaces between iconic images and highly performative events in our totalitarian contemporaneity.

Ana Hoffner holds a Doctorate in Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and The New School in New York. Her recent exhibitions include: Active Intolerance (curated by Benedikt Sjöberg), Kunstverein Braunschweig (upcoming), Kunsthalle Vienna 2021 (curated by Anne Faucheret), Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022/23 (curated by Shubigi Rao), Kochi, India. Body and Territory: Art and Borders in Today’s Austria (curated by Jasna Jakšić and Radmila Iva Janković), Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. Collections of Solidarity Futures (curated by Andreja Hribernik and Laboratory of Art Collections of Non-Aligned Countries), (KGLU), Slovenj Gradec, and CGU Miodrag Dado Đurić, Cetinje.

The Laboratory of Art Collections of Non-Aligned Countries is a project of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, initiated in March 2022 by a team of curators and conservators, including Anita Ćulafić, Marina Čelebić, Nada Baković, and Natalija Vujošević. The project’s activities revolve around the Collection of Art of Non-Aligned Countries, aiming to develop contemporary research and archival art practices and implement them in the institution’s artistic and educational programs by connecting this collection, which testifies to an important international historical context, with the international academic and artistic community. The intention is to continuously develop activities through this program that would contribute to historicization and new readings, as well as the renewal of international communications and exchanges that the collection has nurtured.