Exhibition on view from: August 21, 2018 to October 14, 2018
Exhibition Curator: Katarina Jurjavčič
The photographic exhibition entitled The Year of the Break. 1948, is a visual narrative of 1948 through a selection of photographic works by several authors from the photographic collection Foto Slovenija and the fund of the photographer Vladimir Šimičič – Vlastja, whose negatives are kept in the photo-library of the National Museum of Contemporary History. The thematically organised photographs show the important events of a year that marked deviation from the previously mapped path of post-war development of Slovenia within the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Everyday life was swamped with slogans of hope in a better tomorrow in the light of the new post-war ideology. Optimism was reinforced by promises of introducing a more socially equitable arrangement, many “construction sites” opened up in towns and cities and rebuilding the country was in full swing in the countryside. There was lively activity in the construction of cooperative centres, renovating and building new traffic links, and watercourse management. Young people were attending classes in the second post-war school year and some of them even went on holiday to seaside and mountain colonies in the summer. In the political field, the Second Congress of the Communist Party of Slovenia took place, eleven years after the founding congress. The public followed the course of several of the “Dachau Processes” through loudspeakers, which primarily referred to Stalinist processes in the Soviet Union. The year 1948 marked a turning point for those Slovenes and their families who were waiting outside Yugoslav borders for departure to a new homeland. The thirty-two chosen photographs conclude with an image of the bust of Josip Stalin “dumped” on a pile of Russian coloured literature and the archives of Slovenski Poročevalec. Yugoslavia took a new path of ideological change. Self-management became the basis of a new system of socialist democracy.
