Božidar Jakac Art Museum | Vladimir Makuc, The Man Who Loved Birds

Museums in Short Award 2022

 

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF VLADIMIR MAKUC

 

 

 

Galerija Božidar Jakac – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art is located in the historical town of Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia. Founded in 1974, it is in a former Cistercian monastery from the 13th century. Its original mission is to preserve and exhibit 20th-century art with a focus on tendencies of the 1920s and 1930s, such as expressionism, new objectivity and social realism. Furthermore, the Museum systematically explores developments of post-war modernism and contemporary art. Besides the permanent and temporary exhibitions, the institution has organised the International Sculpture Symposium Forma Viva since 1961, resulting in a sculpture park surrounding the complex.  

 

 

One of the central missions of the Museum is to organise exhibitions of modern and contemporary artists. Therefore, in 2022, a comprehensive retrospective of Vladimir Makuc (1925-2016), one of the most acclaimed modern artists from Slovenia, has been showcased. To contextualise the exhibition, a film was produced, capturing selected motifs that appear in the artist's works and revisiting the places that he most commonly depicted. The film is a hypothetical display of a day in the life of the artist, showcasing his visual universe in which landscapes and birds occupy a very special place.

The idea for the film came from our curator, Maja Bahar, who has outstanding experience creating video content. She brought together an interdisciplinary team of filmmakers, editors and musicians who collectively conceived the film Vladimir Makuc – Man Who Loved Birds. Even though the people involved with the production were highly experienced, the film was entirely low-budget since the museum did not have additional funding for it.