The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska hosted creative workshops for children called “Artmatika” on 25 January, as an event accompanying the “Parallels” exhibition.

The event took place as part of the project of the same name by the Banja Luka Centre for Preschool Education, on the initiative of the Kolibri Kindergarten in Lazarevo.

Inspired by the exhibition “Parallels”, four workshops were specially designed to work with 30 five- and six-year-olds attending the Kolibri Kindergarten. While working on their creative art assignments, the children got to meet artists Radoslav Tadić and Slobodan Vidović, who presented to them their works on display in the “Parallels” exhibition and told them about how to paint. After the workshops finished, the children displayed their works around the MSURS exhhibition rooms, followed by a performance they gave in front of the museum, as a symbolic gesture meant to invite and greet visitors to the Museum.

The “Artmatika” project was launched at the end of 2016 as a demonstration of a new teaching approach used by preschool teachers, which is aimed at an early development and acquisition of mathematical concepts by children using different types of art. The approach aims at creating an atmosphere of support and encouragement of creative visual expression in order to help children critically observe the world surrounding them, and to stimulate them to become perceptive of and responsive to visual and spatial relations, as well as capable of logical and mathematical reasoning. Encouraging children to autonomously engage in various activities helps them develop emotional stability and self-reliance. Events like these workshops are intended to reveal to children the fun side of mathematics, which seems forgotten.

The workshops were run by preschool teachers Jelena Radošević and Nataša Radošević from the Kolibri Kindergarten, along with their colleague Svjetlana Mamić, the kindergarten pedagogue.