COURAGE

connecting collections

This fascinating collection sheds insight on generally unknown moments of everyday life in southwest Bulgaria during state socialism, including: the experience of and resistance against collectivization; experiences reflecting the religious policy of the communist regime (e.g. towards Muslims) and others elements of everyday life. The collection is one of the first created by the Balkan Society for Autobiography and Social Communication - Blagoevgrad (BSASC). It mainly consists of oral histories and photographic documentation, which aim to share ordinary people's experience of socialism.

The FV 112/15 Group Collection is a blend of artistic materials representing the time, social movements, and lifestyle of young people in Slovenia in the 1980s. It documents a central part of Ljubljana’s subculture and the alternative youth movement through the work of an amateur theatre group called the FV 112/15 Theatre and through the activities of three alternative clubs. The group cultivated an ironic attitude toward socialism and deconstructed bourgeois stereotypes.

Lydia Sklevicky's Feminist Collection at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb consists of a newspaper and periodicals collection, documentation and a library that testify to Sklevicky’s professional work and interests, primarily related to feminism and the issues of women's rights in Yugoslavia and the world. Sklevicky was one of the protagonists of the late 1970s and 1980s who put women's issues in focus and criticized the unenviable position of women in Yugoslavia, particularly by pointing out the discrepancy between their contribution in World War II and their prominent role in the post-war period on the one hand, and their re-marginalization since the mid-1950s on the other. 

The "Special Collection" of the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) was established in 1937, and it contains some of the best works of the Ukrainian avant-garde and monumental art. The collection is comprised mostly of paintings and graphics that were considered inappropriate and unacceptable by the regime. They were collected by the secret police over a two-year period from museum in Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv and Poltava and were slated to be destroyed. However, they were preserved secretly in the museum, remaining hidden from the public eye during the Soviet period. Many of the artists represented in the collection were either repressed or executed for “formalism” or “bourgeois nationalism,” and many of their names were undeservedly forgotten until the late 1980s.