The Museum of the Nineties in Belgrade is an innovative, participatory project that maps out the most chaotic decade in modern post-Yugoslav history. Instead of dusty statues, this space focuses on the “ordinary” life of people who navigated the 1990s. The museum employs a multimedia approach, drawing on a wide range of artifacts to document this turbulent era. It showcases everything from the testimonies of those who lived through the war(s) and the reality of extreme poverty to the defiant visual aesthetics of anti-war protests. Alongside the permanent exhibition “Labyrinth of the Nineties”, the space serves as a cultural hub, hosting exhibitions by prominent artists, book launches, and panel discussions. For an international visitor, the museum provides the essential context needed to understand Belgrade’s (and not only Belgrade’s) grit and spirit. This museum doesn’t gloss over the past with nostalgia but rather uses personal stories and archival materials to show how politics collided with the living room.
In 2020, Dejan Ubović, the director of the Cultural Center Grad, came up with an idea. He believed that the nineties deserved a museum — a museum of the nineties. Instead of salving our conscience, turning our backs on the past, and carrying on as usual, the idea was to preserve the memory of that decade as a warning. Through a new conceptual language, the museum invites us all to re-engage with the nineties in the former Yugoslavia, to place that decade in a global context, and to critically reflect on it and our present.
Ubović invited the writer and philosopher Igor Štiks and the historian Dubravka Stojanović to join him in creating the Museum. From the beginning, it was clear that the prospective exhibition on the 1990s would require input from colleagues and experts from across the former Yugoslavia. The question remained: how to “present” the nineties in a single exhibition? After many exhausting conversations, the concept was embodied in a single word: labyrinth. The exhibition takes the form of a labyrinth, with thematic “rooms” offering new perspectives on the decade. Visitors are confronted with a crucial question: have post-Yugoslav societies truly exited the labyrinth they entered in the early 1990s?
To learn more about the decade that shaped our present, get the digital edition of City Less Ordinary.
Photographs: Bojan Kovačević
