COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Saulė Kisarauskienė collection contains documents relating to the life and work of the Lithuanian painter Saulė Kisarauskienė, her family, and her husband, the famous artist and nonconformist painter Vincas Kisarauskas. She is a well-known representative of the Lithuanian school of exlibris, and the collection contains originals of her works. During Soviet times, Saulė Kisarauskienė adhered to the principles of her creative vision and free thinking, and was marginalised for this in the 1960s by the Soviet regime. 

The “Sixtiers Museum” Collection is located in a small museum in Kyiv, Ukraine in a building belonging to the Ukrainian political party Rukh. Nadia Svitlychna and Mykola Plakhotniuk founded this museum as way of honouring and documenting the struggles of a cohort of Soviet Ukrainian dissidents during the 1960s-1980s. Included in the permanent exhibition are paintings, graphics, sculptures, embroidery and other artworks produced by artists affiliated with the sixtiers movement. The museum also displays the poems, letters and literary works of the writers in their midst, as well as their typewriters, handcrafted items made while in the GULag, or clothes worn while living in exile, like Svitlychna’s own camp uniform. Also figuring prominently are posters for events and exhibitions organized by this group. The guided tour is a moving, concise rendition of their struggle, aimed at the museum’s target audiences, young students, scholars, and the general public.

These materials depict the lives of a dynamic group of Soviet Ukrainians engaged in a principled creative and ideological struggle with the Soviet regime in the 1960s and 1970s. They were poets, artists, graphic designers, historians, doctors, and even a Soviet army official, all of whom became deeply involved in human rights activism under late socialism. Many were members of large Soviet institutions—like the Ukrainian writers and artist unions, the Literary Institute in Kyiv, the Soviet armed forces. The Soviet government’s ideological retrenchment after Khrushchev transformed these dissidents, who had worked hard to try and reform the system and make it more humane, into individuals in open conflict with the authorities.

The collection of Society for Queer Memory represents a unique set of daily needs items, printed materials, private funds and oral testimonies capturing the history, memory and everydayness of LGBT/queer people living in Czech milieu. The oldest members of the community are perceived as bearers of a specific historical memory based on their experience of the second half of the 20th century, when they were criminalized and subjected to repression by the state. Thus, the collection focuses also on defensive strategies of “dual life” of this particular social group, both official and private.

Sorin Costina’s private collection is illustrative of the visual art that evaded the official aesthetic canons of the communist regime in Romania. The collection is all the more valuable as the artists represented in it, who were marginal in the last two decades of communism, when ideological control became stricter and stricter, received due recognition both nationally and internationally after 1989.

As the largest national public collection, the Contemporary Collection of the Hungarian National Gallery contains a significant number of Hungarian artworks made between 1945 and today. The acquisition of the collection can be divided into different phases: in certain periods the goal of what type of works to collect shifted in accordance with the actual cultural politics. Since the eighties, they extended the collection backward in time as well, so today they own thousands of pieces which were previously a blind spot due to political reasons, but relevant in terms of cultural opposition. The procurement process is still ongoing.