SAM DURANT: Monuments, Plans and Utopias at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro is pleased to announce the exhibition Monuments, Plans and Utopias by renowned American artist Sam Durant. This exhibition continues his long-term series Proposals for Monuments, presenting the latest iteration of the artist’s exploration of the postcolonial period, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the symbolism of monuments, and their role in social change.
The work on display at MSUM is a version of the exhibition Nonaligned Echoes: Gifts and Returns, which Durant realized in September 2024 for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, under the curatorial guidance of Natalija Vujošević. Through this exhibition, the artist invites visitors to critically engage with historical narratives, actively participate in the creative process, and explore new possibilities for collective memory and a shared future.
For the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, Durant created a scale model of Park Petrović, the site where the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries once stood in Podgorica. As in his previous works from the Proposals for Monuments series, Durant designed a miniature model of a park with trees, roads, and buildings. He then selected 25 artworks from the NAM collection, depicting groups of people engaged in various activities—from agricultural labor, dance, and religious gatherings to workers’ protests and anticolonial struggles. The artist invited visitors to engage in learning, reflecting, and imagining an alternative world by creating monuments, writing slogans, and exploring past ideas that once envisioned futures different from the one that materialized. In this way, the exhibition became an active, process-oriented space and a collective artwork. By subverting the often-intimidating role of monuments—typically erected by those in power to control the interpretation of history—the work transformed them into blueprints for a better world, conceived and created by ordinary people.
Conceived as part of the artist’s research into the Non-Aligned Movement and its relationship with the collection in Podgorica, the work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova expands into a platform for imagining possible futures by learning from historical lessons and re-examining the concepts of horizontality and solidarity, which formed the foundation of this historical idea. In this version, the artist employs a slightly different conceptual approach—juxtaposing the park model with drawings of monuments and photographs of mock-ups from national collections and the photo archive of Moderna galerija, which are integral to the work. The selected drawings and photographs are sketches and studies by some of the most significant Slovenian artists, who, after World War II, and particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, created numerous monuments dedicated to the antifascist struggle, partisan heroes, the revolution, and other war-related themes. These monumental sculptures and urban architectural creations were built in various styles, from socialist realism to high modernism, serving both educational and commemorative purposes. Inspired by the national liberation struggle of the peoples of Yugoslavia, they were deeply connected to the collective experience of resistance. Unlike realized monuments, the sketches and studies are conceptually and formally much more abstract and utopian. It is as if the artists were aware that the lifespan of monuments is limited by political realities—what is celebrated in one era can quickly become condemned or destroyed in another. The fate of some monuments in the 1990s, following the regime change in the former Yugoslav state, is well known—many were severely damaged or even destroyed. On the other hand, some of these monuments have acquired a new form of recognition as “spomeniks”, although now sanitized and stripped of ideological meaning.
The exhibition Monuments, Plans and Utopias also includes works by Stojan Batič, Janez Lenassi, Marij Pregelj, Jakob Savinšek, Drago Tršar, and Marko Pogačnik. As in Podgorica, the artist invites visitors to actively engage with the exhibition—to learn, play, and propose new monuments and sculptures for the park, imagining an alternative world. The newly created works by visitors become part of the evolving artwork, expanding through new iterations and interactions, emphasizing the connections and interweavings of diverse visions of the future, all rooted in the idea of the commons.
As a result, the park transforms into a utopian space, a collective artwork filled with imaginary monuments. To paraphrase Agamben, engaging with them means restoring them to the past and transmitting them into the future, creating a utopian playland where history is not fixed within chronological time but exists in the kairological time of authentic history. This, then, is a play with time itself—a liberating experience.
The second part of the exhibition includes large-scale drawings from Sam Durant’s series Iconoclasm, installed in public spaces in Ljubljana. These drawings depict acts of destruction inflicted upon public statues and monuments. Based on images sourced from historical archives, newspapers, and television reports, Durant focuses on moments of disruption and engages in contemporary debates about how societies relate to these potent symbols in public spaces.
Sam Durant (born 1961, USA) is a multimedia artist whose work engages with social, political, and cultural issues. His work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta 13, the Yokohama Triennial, and the Venice, Liverpool, Whitney, Sydney, Panama, and Havana Biennials. His works are included in several major public art collections, such as Tate Modern (London), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).
The exhibition at MSUM is curated by Bojana Piškur, with the exhibition program developed by Adela Železnik and Lucija Cvjetković, and visual design by Oleg Šuran.
The Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries Josip Broz Tito was established in 1981 by a decision of the Assembly of the City of Titograd. The collection, now part of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, consists of approximately 800 works, received as gifts and donations from Non-Aligned countries.
Foto credits: Dejan Habicht / Modern Gallery