TrAIN Open Lecture by Bojana Piškur: ‘Museum of the Workers’ – video online

On Wednesday 18 February 2015, Bojana Piškur gave a lecture titled ‘Museum of the Workers’, at Central Saint Martins in London, following an introduction by Lucy Steeds. Piškur discussed socialist museums, looking at case studies in the former Yugoslavia and other socialist countries.

After the 1990s the humanist ideas of socialism, socialist cultural policies and the topic of non-alignment seemed to become obsolete and were widely forgotten; however, there has been a renewed interest in these issues giving rise to the following questions: What progressive socialist cultural policies, museum models and directions could be applied to the models of museum of today? What elements, traditions and references from past experiences can be extracted in times of neoliberal capitalism? And most importantly: how do we translate these ideas into praxis?

Bojana Piškur is a curator at the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana and was a member of Radical Education Collective between 2006 and 2014. Her focus of professional interest is on political issues as they relate to or are manifested in the field of art, with special emphasis on the region of the former Yugoslavia and Latin America.

The event was organised by Afterall editor and TrAIN member Lucy Steeds and part of the Exhibition Histories  research and publication project, developed by Afterall and published in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

The TrAIN Open series is a forum for invited speakers to present exhibition, publication, and research projects in the form of lectures, discussions and screenings. Taking place at fortnightly intervals on Wednesday evenings during the academic term, the series is open to the public, as well as staff and students across the University of the Arts London.