On Wednesday the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana will open the last of the four exhibitions dedicated to art and museum space in the 1980s.

The re-enactment will focus on the second exhibition of Yugoslav documents, held in Sarajevo in 1989, with an emphasis on that which was not in the "Sarajevo documents". Absent from the documents was the socio-political context.

The last exhibition from the Eighties project, entitled The Heritage of 1989. Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documents Exhibition was put together by curators Zdenka Badovinac and Bojana Piškur. The exhibition is a re-enactment of the second and last big art biennial before the breakup of Yugoslavia. It was prepared by artists Jusuf Hadžifejzović and Rade Tadić, and set up on a surface of 8000 square meters in the Skenderija centre in Sarajevo.

"We're in search of common ground. A consideration of the common, as it was, and as it is today, at a time of mass migration and refugees which are changing Europe," said Zdenka Badovinac. According to Badovinac absent from that exhibition was the socio-political context. At today's press-conference Zdenka Badovinac said the re-enactment did not imply a reconstruction and that they were highlighting what was absent from the 1989 exhibition. The curators are mainly interested in analyzing the art of that time and the definition of common as a universal value, which was a characteristic of the socialist system and the artists of that time, as they all wished to see better cooperation between politics and culture.

Almost 30 years later missing photographs add to context
Out of the 189 artists, who took part in the second Sarajevo exhibition, you will be able to see the work of only 90 artists. Four of them have been added to the original exhibition. The majority of artwork on display will be originals, including photographs from the artists and photographs from the original exhibition. Due to the later wars in the region some of the artwork was lost and there are no archives. Those preparing the Slovenian part of the re-enactment were surprised by Jane Štravs's photographs, which were found well-preserved well after the Sarajevo documents.

A. J.; translated by K. J.