On 8 April, an exhibition ‘Imagining the Balkans- Identities and Memories in the long XIX century’ will be opened in National Museum in Ljubljana, as a UNESCO and International Exhibition Committee project which will, for the first time, offer the chance to national historical museums from the region and beyond to jointly present history.
The exhibition promotes that peoples and their history should not be a subject of division, and it was created as a historical opportunity to put national histories in global context and to compare them and revive them.
At this exhibition, BiH will be represented by Museum of RS, whose higher curator Janko Vračar said to FENA that it is a very complex exhibition, concerning the fact that the national identity is complex as well.
He said that the exhibition deals with the development of national identities in South Eastern Europe from 1789, until 1914, and adds that several social fields will be shown, education, culture, social activities, economic development, creation of new classes, etc.
Vračar notes that BiH will exhibit not only its documents photos, but even films, portraits, and uniforms of various important people.
‘The most important BiH exhibit is the uniform of ‘The Sokol Movement’ which is a very rare finding, and no museums have such an exhibit. ‘The Sokol Movement’ was a very significant factor in creation of national identities in the Balkans’, says Vračar.
The exhibition will also present objects that belonged to certain historical people who were important in creating national identities.
After Ljubljana, the exhibition will be opened in Belgrade and Bucharest and it will also be exhibited in BIH in 2016, in the Museum of RS.
The work on this exhibition lasts from 2010, and Turkey also planned to join, but it later quit.
Vračar said that this is a very important exhibition, and no such project have been done before, and it will show the comparative development of national identities in these areas, which will sum up all the regional answers to a question ‘What is national identity and how it developed’.
The aim of the exhibition is to intensify the cooperation and dialogue among museums of national history.
