COURAGE

connecting collections

Smoloskyp is the name of a human rights publishing house, named after the poet Vasyl Symonenko. It was originally founded in Baltimore, US, in 1967. As one of the biggest publishers of Ukrainian dissident literature, nowadays it holds the biggest collection of Ukrainian samizdat (Ukr. samvydav) and the material of the Ukrainian resistance movement (Rukh Oporu), 1960-1990. The phenomenon of Smoloskyp, however, goes far beyond the scope of the publishing house. Smoloskyp is associated with the hub of human rights activities of the Ukrainian diaspora. Smoloskyp took an active part in the campaigns for human rights in Ukraine, and (co)founded several human rights organizations: Smoloskyp Organization for the Defence of Human Rights in Ukraine, Washington Helsinki Guarantees for Ukraine Committee, and the Committee for the Defence of Ukrainian Political Prisoners in the USSR. Smoloskyp activists took part in follow-up meetings to the Helsinki Final Act (1975), held by the OSCE in Belgrade in 1977–78, Madrid in 1980–83, and Vienna in 1986–89. They participated at the International Sakharov Hearing and spoke at the US Congress. Smoloskyp organized a series of protest campaigns against political repression in Soviet Ukraine, and fought for the independent participation of Ukraine in the Olympic games. It ran information services in the US, Canada, and Argentina, widely disseminating factual information on political repression and the dissident movement in Ukraine. It cooperated with international human rights organizations (such as Amnesty International) and sent humanitarian aid to Ukrainian political prisoners. Its secret communication channels along with its own network of specially trained couriers allowed Smoloskyp to establish a two-way traffic of censored information and clandestine materials across the Iron curtain.

After the dissolution of the USSR, this collection moved to Ukraine and was institutionalized as the Museum-Archive and Documentation Centre of Ukrainian Samvydav in Kyiv. Nowadays, the Museum-Archive and Documentation Centre of Ukrainian Samvydav in Kyiv holds the most extensive collection of Ukrainian samizdat; Ukrainian diaspora periodicals; the collection of Ukrainian tamizdat (samizdat materials published abroad in Ukrainian, Russian, English, French, German and other languages); hundreds of photos of Soviet-era political prisoners and dissidents; the archives of several committees for human rights in Ukraine from the US, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and other countries. The collection holds Smoloskyp correspondence with international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International.

The Society for Queer Memory was established in 2013. A year earlier, the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University organised a conference on the topic of the difficulties of research on sexual minorities and queer history. At that conference, the idea to establish a society or institution which would focus on collecting and preserving queer memory originated. Thus, the goal of the Society is to serve as a platform from intergeneration dialogue in LGBT community and gradually build a museum and an audio and written archive documenting the history and memory of queer people. In 2015, the Society acquired suitable premises and opened the Centre for Queer Memory.

One of the main goals of the Society for Queer Memory is oral-historian work which means gathering, archiving and popularizing biographical interviews with LGBT seniors with the possibility of subsequent professional historical processing. Apart from oral historian work, the Society tries to work with queer seniors and serve as a uniting platform. The work and activities of the Society are based on the premise that elderly people are a group considerably threatened by isolation and loneliness and, in the case of queer seniors, this danger could be higher due to their different sexual orientation. This is why the Society organises, within the Centre, at least one event monthly. In the future, the Society plans to establish a permanent exhibition within the museum, as well as to continue with current activities.

The Society of Libri Prohibiti was established in 1991 as a non-profit association of citizens. The aim of this society is securing the operation of the library Libri Prohibiti and supporting its collections. Among the founding members of the society were writers, e.g. Václav Havel, Eva Kantůrková, Ivan Klíma, Hana Ponická, Zdeněk Urbánek, Ludvík Vaculík and Jan Vladislav. Apart from writers, many others important personalities co-founded this society (e.g. Radim Palouš, Milan Jelínek, Vilém Prečan, Pavel Tigrid, Vlastimil Ježek, Jaroslav Opat, Ivan M. Havel, Táňa Dohnalová, Oto Mádr). Today the society has 139 members.

In 1928, the Sofia Municipal Museum was established. It consisted of three departments – Museum, Library and Archive. The establishment of "picture gallery" was an important part of the activities of the museum. From 1929 to 1941 when a specially constructed building for the Sofia City Library and Museum was opened at 3, Banski Square (it was later destroyed during the bombings) the museum occupied different buildings. For the first time, the Sofia picture collection was exhibited there.

In the first several years following World War II the museum went through different stages of development and changes. In 1948, part of its art fund was transferred to the newly-established National Art Gallery in order to lay the beginnings of its art collection. In April 1952, the library and the archive were detached from the City Museum and in October of the same year, with decision of Sofia Municipality, the Sofia History Museum and the City Gallery were pronounced individual institutions. The Sofia City Art Gallery had no exhibition space of its own and from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s it exhibited its collection in a hall located on 11, Levski Str. After 1964 when the hall was destroyed, the works from the funds were exhibited in different cities and towns in the country. 

It was only in 1973 that the Gallery was granted its own space in the building on 1, Gen. Gurko Str. It opened in 1977. In the mid-1970s, the Sofia City Art Gallery preserved 2 607 works distributed in three departments – painting, graphics and sculpture. Today, the Museum has four departments – painting, sculpture, graphics, contemporary art and photography. Its collection consists of more than 8 000 works of Bulgarian artists from the late 19th century to this day. Part of the sculptures are exhibited out in the City Garden.

Over the years, the Sofia City Art Gallery established itself as an important cultural space for the capital. After the fall of the state socialism in 1989, the exhibition policy of the Gallery is open for a broad spectrum of thematic, genre, style and historical exhibitions. A number of initiatives and exhibitions are dedicated to the rationalization of the time of the socialist regime – retrospective exhibitions about leading artists such as Ivan Georgiev – The Rembrandt (curator Krasimir Iliev, 2008), "Lika and Genko" (curator Krasimir Iliev, 2010), Angel Stanev (curator Krasimir Iliev, 2012), Ziyatin Nuriev (curator Krasimir Iliev, 2016) and others. The conceptions of the thematic exhibitions belong to professional curators at the Sofia City Art Gallery (for example the exhibition "Forms of Resistance", curator Krasimir Iliev, 2016; "Visual Chronicles. Nine Portraits of Painters from the Second Half of the 20th Century", curators Mariya Vasileva and Daniela Radeva, 2017). At the same time, people from other spheres of the culture are being invited to offer their point of view on the art preserved at the Sofia City Art Gallery from the time of socialism. Such an exhibition is "The Afternoon of an Ideology" (2016) whose curators are Georgi Lozanov, expert in media and journalism, and Georgi Gospodinov, writer. 

The Sofia City Art Gallery is engaged in scientific and publishing activities as well as in educational programmes. It expands the circle of its audience by organizing meetings, lectures, debates, presentations of books, concerts, film-shows on the topics of the exhibitions and/or video-interviews with artists. Today, the Gallery is a territory for dialogue between the generations of artists and the cultural public which also contributes to the analysis of the development of the Bulgarian art within the global processes.