COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The aim of the C³ video archive is the complete compilation, preservation, cataloguing, archiving and digital transfer of Hungarian video art. Primarily, it was visual artists who began to experiment with this difficult-to-access (due to state control) medium in the second half of the 1970s. Their endeavours were not institutionally supported, with the exception of a few independent workshops. The archive aims to preserve these technologically unstable materials (earlier considered radical approaches to the moving image) in digital format, and, based on research, to make them available in their historical and international context.

The informal group of the Six Artists consisted of Raša Todosijević, Era Milivojević, Marina Abramović, Zoran Popović, Neša Paripović and Gergelj Urkom. The work of these artists began with the establishment of the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade in 1971. It lasted to 1973, when each of them started working independently. Their artistic activity was above all a resistance to the existing practice that was being taught in the framework of school programs at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. They advocated the establishment of a modern approach to the reconstruction and functioning of artistic institutions, as well as to redefining the effects of art. The accent started to be set on the artist as a subject and to his authorial speech, "speech in the first place". The artists began to introduce new media into art (installation, bodybuilding, photography, film, text ...).

“Kowalnia” is the popular name of professor Grzegorz Kowalski's Studio of Audiovisual Space at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Kowalski, a creator of installations and performer, has been its leader since 1984, drawing from the modernist tradition in which he was educated, and the communal, countercultural experiences of his own artistic activity. The studio gained popularity in the 1990s as a forge of the stars of the art world and of some of the most controversial figures in Polish “critical art”. The archive, maintained by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, includes photo and video documentation of the studio's activity, as well as its manifestos, exhibition catalogues and issues of a zine published by students.