exhibition
25 May 2021 > 30 May 2021

videogalleryIgor GrubićFilm screening | Bigger than Myself. Heroic voices from ex-Yugoslavia

videogallery – free entrance
curated by Zdenka Badovinac

opening hours

Monday closed
Tuesday to Sunday 11 am – 7 pm

more information

On the occasion of the exhibition, MAXXI’s videogallery hosts a series of works by the artists Igor Grubić, Goran Dević, Anja Medved & Nadja Velušček.

The most recent history of the territories of former Yugoslavia runs through the four films by Igor Grubić selected for this programme: East Side Story(2008), Monument(2015), Angels with dirty faces (2006), How steel was tempered(2018). Each work recounts with different perspectives and techniques (found footage, documentary, animation) some of the most important events of the historical period of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the dissolution of Socialism.

From the violence perpetrated by the forces of law and order during the two gay pride events in Belgrade in 2001 and Zagreb in 2002 recounted in East Side Story, to the destruction of some imposing anti-fascist cement memorials in the 1990s, the protagonist of Monument; from the strike of the Kolubara miners (Angels with dirty faces) that led to the fall of Milošević to the personal story of a former steel mill worker who leaves his son the memory of what he was in the extraordinary animation How steel was tempered.


The films in the programme, in continuity with the themes of the exhibition, reflect on the idea of loss and change, both provoked by the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, the end of Socialism, its inclusion in global Capitalism and its integration into the European Union.

header: Igor Grubić, Monument, 2015, 44′  (still from video) courtesy the artist and Laveronica arte contemporanea.