COURAGE

connecting collections

Material from the Museum of the River Daugava was used for the exhibition 'Let the River Daugava Be', which opened on 21 September 2017 at the National History Museum of Latvia. The exhibition was about the struggle by the public to save part of the Daugava valley in 1958-1959, and the campaign against the construction of the Daugavpils hydroelectric station in 1986-1987. 

Movie Thursday (Filmski četvrtak) was launched in 2013 for the popularization and promotion of the film archival materials stored in the Croatian Cinematheque. Film projections are held once a month.

Within the projections from the National Collection of the Croatian Film Archive, four short films of Nikša Fulgosi were presented: Privatni rat građanina iks [The Private War of Citizen X] (1962, 10 min), Drugarstvo na putu [Camaraderie on the road] (1963, 13 min), Ravnodušnost na ulicama [Indifference on the Streets] (1963., 11 min) and Put nije samo vaš [The Road Isn’t Just Yours] (1963, 13 min).

In some of his films, Nikša Fulgosi submitted subversive or explicit political messages that might be related to cultural opposition. Although the main purpose of the films was education of the wider population, Fulgosi made sarcastic observations about social everyday life.

The program was prepared by the film archivist Mladen Burić, and the review after the screening was presented by Željko Luketić, film critic, publicist and screenwriter.

On 10 October 2017 the collection was increased with Laszlo Ocsovszky’s collection, who is a retired journalist, son-in-law of Gyuláné Szentirmai, the Galyasi’s last caregiver. The volume of his collection is about four archival boxes, which includes the Galyasi’s literary work, correspondence, personal and official documents and photos.

On May 5, 2017, the COURAGE project of the Croatian Institute of History, together with the Croatian State Archives and the National and University Library, organised the academic workshop entitled “From Obscurity To Visibility: Croatian Emigrant Communities (1945―1990) in the Collections of Cultural Heritage and Scholarly Institutions.” The primary goal of the workshop was to introduce the scientific community and the broader public to the emigrant collections in the cultural and educational institutions of the Republic of Croatia. The COURAGE project team from Croatia wanted to raise awareness of the importance of this unexplored heritage and to spark the interest of researchers in this issue. Martina Jurčić, a librarian at the Croatian Institute of History Library, also attended the workshop and talked about the Jere Jareb Collection, which is kept in the Institute’s library. She spoke of the history and content of the collection, as well as the storage problems confronted by the Institute’s library. Jurčić also outlined the most important details from the biography of historian Jere Jareb.

On the occasion of the exhibition “Apprenticeship among arts: Sorin Costina collector,” organized by ARCUB, a volume was launched that analyses both the profile of the Bucharest exhibition of works selected from the Sorin Costina collection and the specific character of the complete art collection owned by Sorin Costina. The editor-coordinator of the volume is Erwin Kessler, one of the most well-known Romanian aestheticians and curators, and has a title corresponding to that of the exhibition. It was published in a Romanian–English bilingual edition by the Vellant publishing house in 2017.

Of the specific character of the collection, Erwin Kessler writes: “Through the ambitious profile of his collection and its scope in relation to the cultural geography of Romanian art, not to mention the number of pieces (which approaches 1,000, bringing together painting, sculpture, ceramic, and drawing), the Sorin Costina collection stands out as the most consistent, significant, and representative collection of Romanian art of the 1970 to 1990s. It is a sort of (reified) treatise on the Romanian art of the period after the prescription of socialist realism, a codex of Romanian art created outside (but not so much opposing as ignoring) the dogmas of official art, in which may be recognized almost all the names that made up (then) and make up (now too) the canon of Romanian contemporary art.” The volume also includes a postface by Sorin Costina and a catalogue of the Sorin Costina Collection by Carola Chişiu, together with high-quality reproductions of the most representative pieces in the collection.