One of the events accompanying the Vojin Bakić exhibition "Lightbearing Forms" was the curator tour led by Nataša Ivančević, museum advisor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, who presented to the visitors the concept underlying the project.
Since only fragments of this great artist’s oeuvre used to be shown previously, Ms Ivančević pointed out that with this exhibition the artist’s complete oeuvre was being valuated for the first time, and the creative process behind his abstract style objectively interpreted and understood, as inseparable from the European modernist tradition. The lecture "Vojin Bakić’s memorial sculpture: The paradigm of an era" was given by Prof. Zvonko Maković, who spoke about Vojin Bakić’s paradigmatic role in creating monuments/memorials. It is possible to recognise changes to the political and ideological system of Yugoslavia in Bakić’ works; it was he who developed a unique form of monumentality in the 1950’s and 1960’s, characterised by high aesthetic and expressive qualities, as typical of late modernism. Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s, memorial sculpture was seen as a medium which condensed the ideology of the dying system. Monuments were destroyed in an attempt to symbolically erase the past, along with the memory inscribed in those gigantic signs.
