In this exhibition, Vesna Pavlovic continues to explore the archive of images of the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, Serbia. The archive is the visual record of Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito’s career and his travels around former Yugoslavia and the world. It represents a psychological portrait of an era, burdened with photographic representation of socialist propaganda. The project examines the role of spectacle in state ideology through the lens of photographic representation. Personal and individual experience is juxtaposed with the collective representations of the national unity. The tension between the archive's private intention and its public display is central to the character of the archive's photographic and historical representation.
The central piece of the installation is the film of a performance, which took part in 1979, on the occasion of Josip Broz Tito’s birthday. Here the author has participated in a choreographed spectacle as a designated Tito’s pioneer. Photographs of the archive itself are combined with projected images onto the grey fabric. The use of fabric serves as a symbolic representation of the “ideological curtain” often used as a backdrop for communist party meetings.
