Guided exhibition: The Collection as a Verb (Sad Songs of War; Comradeship; Futures; Flowers–Non-Flowers–Something Third)

The exhibition cycle “The Collection as a Verb” presents a new ongoing exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art which redefines the understanding of the museum and the social context in which it operates. The exhibitions are not a finished project; they are a process and a swift reaction to the events surrounding us. “The Collection as a Verb” consists of the following exhibitions: “Sad Songs of War”, conceived as a response to the current situation and to the wish to express solidarity and empathy with a country experiencing what marked this region during the war in the 1990s; “Comradeship”, which opens the themes of solidarity and compassion and the role of art and museums in improving the world, through works from the MSU collections created by artistic collectives, as well as works by artists realised in cooperation with various communities; “Futures”, which examines what ideas and visions of the future have developed in art from the 1960s until today; and “Flowers–Non-Flowers–Something Third”, which brings together works that refuse fixed identities and clear boundaries and instead embody fragmented subjectivities and explore the spaces in between: the socially accepted and the marginalised, the female and the male, the normative and the rejected. The exhibition rejects single narratives and binary oppositions, opening space for “something third” as a fluid, changeable zone of meaning. The motif running through this project – “we build the museum, the museum builds us” – was devised by the artist Igor Grubić.