MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ZAGREB IS OPEN
On Friday, December 11, 2009 at 8.00 p.m. the new building of Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU, http://www.msu.hr/) opened its gates to distinguished guests invited to the festive inauguration. The museum was officially opened by Croatia's Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor and by Milan Bandić, mayor of Zagreb, while Snježana Pintarić, director of MSU, and Božo Biškupić, minister of culture, welcomed the guests. The inauguration programme was coordinated by Krešimir Dolenčić, well known Croatian theatre director, and numerous events took place in front of the museum, as well as on top of the building and inside. We would especially like to mention the inaugurations of many installations and the Moving Collections, Museum's first permanent exhibition, authored by curators Nada Beroš and Tihomir Milovac.
The inauguration music programme was performed by well-known Croatian musicians and music groups (biNg baNG, XLtuba, Massimo and others). At the very moment of inauguration Cantus Ensemble performed John Cage's, as it seems, still controversial 4'33'' (premiered in 1952). Afterwards, a concert with the following programme was held in the excellent multimedia hall: Krešimir Seletković, disORDER; Dubravko Detoni, dolce furioso with soloist Saša Nestorović, our famous sax player, this time in an unusual role playing a SY 77; and Un jardin sous la pluie avec un compositeur sans parapluie by Berislav Šipuš.
All these events were accompanied by projections of video-mapping on the Museum's building, while the events within were screened on the western façade.
The Museum was founded on December 7, 1954. At once it became an important reference point on the cultural map of Zagreb and soon it gained a wider international significance. Since the 1960s there has been a wish to expand the Museum, primarily because of the local and international importance of its collections, which were kept in inadequate conditions and were not fully accessible to the public. But let's make it brief: the project of Igor Franić won the international competition of 1999. The construction began in 2003, jointly financed by the City of Zagreb and the Croatian Ministry of Culture. The new building of MSU has been the largest cultural investment in independent Croatia (the Museum covers an area of 14 500 square meters, 5000 of which are intended for exhibition purposes).
"The culminating point of the official opening ceremony was staged by the members of Cantus Ensemble. Led by their conductor Berislav Šipuš, they performed John Cage's 4'33''. As is well known, this composition consists of several minutes of silence, numerically fixed in the composition title. It is not easy to follow the ideas of the American composer and Schoenberg's pupil, who in his lifetime became famous for his prepared piano works. Šipuš conducted silence as an introduction to a revelatory event, uncovering the true range and extent of its possibilities.
As the fog enfolds high mountain tops, so does silence enfold great events. However, the opening of the museum or, we might say, its birth, was disturbed by the crudeness of its most distinguished guests, the ones we call ‘very important persons', who kept applauding pompously in between movements. Šipuš's warnings were all in vain; after each movement the VIPs clapped insistently, convinced that their personal void was as meaningful as the musical silence. Way to go!"
(excerpt from newspaper critique: Zdravko Zima, Glas Istre, 13 December 2009)
