Sam Durant: Monuments, Plans and Utopias

Exhibition opening: 20 February 2025 at 8 p.m.

The exhibition Monuments, Plans and Utopias continues the trajectory of Sam Durant’s long-term work Proposals for Monuments, and represents the latest iteration in a series of projects that address the postcolonial period, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the lives and deaths of monuments, and the intersection of cultural production and the struggle for independence. The work shown at the MSUM is a version of the Nonaligned Echoes: Gifts and Returns exhibition that the artist prepared for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro in September 2024, curated by Natalija Vujošević.

For the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, the artist created a model of Park Petrović, the site of the former Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries* in Podgorica. As in his previous works in the series Proposals for Monuments, Durant has created a scale model of a park with trees, roads and buildings. He then selected 25 artworks from the NAM collection, works that depict groups of people engaged in various activities, ranging from fieldwork, dance, and religious gatherings to portrayals of workers’ protests and anticolonial struggles. The artist invited visitors to participate in learning, reflecting on, and imagining an alternative world by creating monuments, writing slogans, and learning from past ideas that once envisioned futures different from the one that has materialized. In this way, the exhibition became an active, process-oriented space and collective artwork. By subverting the often intimidating role of monuments, typically erected by those who wield power and thus control the interpretation of history, the work transformed them into blueprints for a better world, conceived and created by ordinary people.

Conceived within the framework of the artist’s research into the Non-Aligned Movement and its interaction with the collection in Podgorica, the work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova expands as a platform for imagining possible futures by learning from historical lessons, revisiting the concepts of horizontality and solidarity upon which this historical idea was based. In this iteration, the artist has chosen a slightly different conceptual method – he juxtaposed the scale model of a park with drawings of monuments and photographs of mock-ups from the national collections and the photo archive of the Moderna galerija as an integral part of the work. The selected drawings and photos are sketches and studies by some of the most important Slovenian artists who, after the Second World War, and especially in the 1950s and 1960s, created a large number of monuments on the theme of the anti-fascist struggle, partisan heroes, revolution, and other war-related themes. These monuments, sometimes colloquially referred to as “partisan monuments” – monumental sculptures and urban architectural creations – were built in a variety of styles, from socialist realism to high modernism. They were erected to educate and commemorate, inspired by the national liberation struggle of the peoples of Yugoslavia and linked to the collective experience of the resistance. Unlike the 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 life of monuments is also limited to a time determined by political realities, and that what is an object of praise in one period can quickly become an object of condemnation and destruction in another. The fate of some monuments in the 1990s, when a change of regime took place in the former common Yugoslav state, is well known; many were heavily damaged or even destroyed. On the other hand, some of these monuments have achieved a different fame, as spomeniks, although these are now sanitized objects, cleansed of any ideological meaning.

The exhibition Monuments, Plans and Utopias also features works from Stojan Batič, Janez Lenassi, Marij Pregelj, Jakob Savinšek, Drago Tršar and Marko Pogačnik as its integral part. In the same way as in Podgorica, the artist invites visitors to engage with the work as a key aspect of the exhibition process: to learn, to play, and to suggest new monuments and sculptures for the park – to imagine an alternative world. The newly created works by visitors form a part of the artwork, which expands through new iterations and interactions, emphasizing the connections and interweavings among diverse visions of the future grounded in the idea of the commons.

Consequently the park then becomes a utopian place, a collective artwork full of imaginary monuments, and playing with them, to paraphrase Agamben, means restoring them to the past and transmitting them to the future, thus creating a utopian playland where history is not fixed and set in chronological time, but in the “kairological time of authentic history.” It is then, 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 enacted upon public statues and monuments. Based on images found in various historic sources – such as newspaper and television reports – the artist focuses on moments of disruption and calls on current debates about how we relate to these potent symbols placed in public spaces.

Sam Durant (born 1961, USA) is a multimedia artist whose works engage with social, political, and cultural issues. Sam Durant’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including Documenta 13, the Yokohama Triennial, and the Venice, Liverpool, Whitney, Sydney, Panama and Havana Biennials. His work can be found in many public art collections including Tate Modern, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

https://www.samdurant.net/

The exhibition at the MSUM is curated by Bojana Piškur, the exhibition program developed by Adela Železnik and Lucija Cvjetković, and visual design by Oleg Šuran.