COURAGE

connecting collections

The Ukrainian government and Kyiv City officials allocated funds in to open the Sixtiers Museum in 2012, as an affiliate of the Kyiv History Museum, which is a network that includes eight other museums in the city. The museum is located on the ground floor of the building occupied by the political party Rukh, but its operations are very much shaped and constrained by the manner in which the museum-archive was opened. Unlike institutions that have been given the designation of national repositories, the Sixtiers Museum operates at the level of a local Kyivan institution. Given the importance of the sixtiers movement, the curators believe that another restructuring is in order, especially one that expands their storage and exhibition capacity and allows them to display the full breadth and depth of the movement, which really operated on a national and transnational level. 

The collection contains materials describing the activities of Brno´s protestant dissent, which also included the philosopher Božena Komárková. It also documents lectures from the secretive meetings which were in held in Božena Komárková’s apartment. The collection was donated to the Moravian Museum in 2012 by Jan Šimsa and Milena Šimsová, whom had Božena Komárková´s estate in their flat for 15 years.

The collection is important proof of the activities of a left-thinking historian, a "spiritual father" and co-founder of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), a co-publisher of unofficial periodic Dialogy, who was imprisoned several times and forced to go to exile, where he collaborated with dissidents from other socialist countries. In 2012 the first part of the collection was donated to the Moravian Museum.    

The documentary film Relations. 25 years of the lesbian group ŠKUC-LL (Razmerja. 25 let lezbične sekcije ŠKUC-LL, Ljubljana, 2012, 84 min) was released on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the lesbian organization ŠKUC LL to mark a quarter of a century of the lesbian movement in Slovenia. Through private recollections, interviews and a wealth of documentary video materials, the film Relations traces the history of ŠKUC LL since its foundation until 2012. The film features prominent Slovenian activists and feminists who directly participated in Lesbian Section first public activities in the 1980s, such as Suzana Tratnik, Natasa Sukič, Mojca Dobnikar, Natasa Velikonja and Tatjana Greif. The first part of the film is focused on the lesbian and gay movement that emerged in the 1980s in the Yugoslav socialist context. Media and video materials from Lesbian Library and Archive were extensively used in the film, i.e., the cover of Lesbosine magazine in 1988.

The author and director, Marina Gržinić, a Slovenian philosopher and visual artist, together with co-authors Aina Šmid and Zvonka T Simčič, described Relations on the promotional webpage as follows: “The film presents a variety of processes of marginalization and the struggle for rights by the lesbian and LGBT community in Slovenia and beyond in the former Yugoslavia. It is a struggle for visibility, but also a testimony to the incredible power of the lesbian movement, its artistic and cultural potential, critical discourses and emancipatory politics. The film consists of interviews, documents, art projects, nightlife, political appearances, and critical discourse. The film also talks about Europe, global world capitalism and the status of lesbians today.” (http://grzinic-smid.si/?p=276).

Authors and directors: Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, Zvonka T Simčič.

The exhibition ‘Lietuvos Katalikų Bažnyčios Kronikai – 40 metų’ (The 40th Anniversary of The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania) was held on 12-26 March 2012 in the Lithuanian parliament (Seimas). The exhibition was accompanied by the international conference 'Tiesos žodis – kelias į laisvę: Lietuvos Katalikų Bažnyčios Kronika 1972–1988 metais’ (Truth as the Path to Freedom. The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania in the Period 1972-1988), in which historians, politicians and former anti-Soviet dissidents took part. One famous guest at the conference was the well-known Russian human rights activist Sergei Kovalev, a former distributor of the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. The organisers of the exhibition and the conference were the Lithuanian parliament and the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania.