Lecture: Willam Kentridge – the art of remembrance Lecture will be held by: Srđan Tunić, art historian and MAA associate
		Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 at 6 p.m. (Novi Prostor, SKC, Kralja Milana Street no. 48)

William Kentridge is one of the most well-known South African contemporary artists. This year Belgrade audience had a chance to come to know his characteristic animated films made of charcoal drawings, on the 51st October Salon. His art deals with intimate experience of the apartheid and problematising our notion of political art, understanding the nature of forgetting and keeping memories, as well as unveiling the dark history of humankind that tends to be suppressed and the responsibility, which is always collective as well as personal.

The lecture will be focused on the artworks exhibited at the October Salon, with a short review of other artworks of this multimedia artist, describing the context in which he creates and summarizing the main themes that reoccur through his art. Also, the lecture will be accompanied with a short animated film Stereoscope (1999).

Bojana Pokrajac, moderator

		Lecture : JEWELRY OF ETHIOPIA – Symbols, Meanings, Identities Lecture will be held by: Aleksandra Prodanović-Bojović, MAA curator
		Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010 at 6 p.m. (SKC, Kralja Milana Street no. 48)

The rich cultural heritage of Ethiopia, that remained hidden to the European gaze for a long time, may be encountered through the artistic traditions that have flourished in these parts over the centuries. Jewelry as a decorative form linked to the body, has an animated presence in everyday life of the individual and community, thus documenting and transmitting cultural meanings.

The lecture will present the decorative traditions of Ethiopia that have arisen on different cultural basis. Besides cross-pendants of Christian believers and silver-beaded jewelry with motifs that date the ancient art of the Axum period – prolific bridal necklaces worn by Muslim women, talismanic xirisi pendants and other examples of art that reveal Indian and Arab artistic influences, will also be presented. By observing jewelry as a reservoir of symbols and meanings, a stylistic and anthropological analysis of certain types of objects will also be conducted. The transformation of jewelry into a visual sign that conveys the identity of different ethnic groups and overall Ethiopian identity will also be subject to examination.

The lecture will be complemented with a presentation on which basis it will be possible for those present to learn of the richness of materials, forms and types of jewelry that are part of the decorative heritage of Ethiopian peoples. The lecture accompanies the Jewelry of Ethiopia exhibition at the Museum of African Art, which will showcase original jewelry of the ethnic groups of Ethiopia.

Lecture will be held by: Aleksandra Prodanović-Bojović, MAA curator.

		the MAA and the Embassy of the Republic of Angola will organise a lecture The Literature and Life of Dr. Agostinho Neto
		On the occasion of the Hero’s Day: Friday, 17th September 2010, from 19.00 to 20.30 hours

The National Heroes Day in Angola is celebrated on September 17 – the birthday of the national hero Agostinho Neto. The event will be celebrated at the Museum through a lecture on the life and literature of Agostinho Neto, with excerpts from his poetry.
The lecture will be held in Serbian and English.

Entrance: free

For a long time, Africans have satisfied their need to express feelings and visions through drawings and colour, creating art on different surfaces: whether on rocks or the human body.

The Saharan region, which holds several hundreds of thousands of engraved drawings and rock images, represented the largest Neolithic painted complex that was produced over a long period of time, dating from 7000 BC to the beginning of the current era. Because of the artistic ability and the clever use of painting materials and surfaces, the artists of Neolithic Sahara, apart from producing sophisticated and expressive pictorial effects, managed, through their works,  to achieve a specific chronicle of the prehistoric times of the African continent.

The study of the vast Saharan painting opus is achieved through several thematic units that constituted this art from its early beginnings to historical times. These units are: the history of the study of Saharan painting, Saharan Neolithic, painting techniques (engravings and paintings on rocks) and the timeline of painting. Sahara’s “largest open-air museum in the world“ allows us to take a glimpse into the spiritual life of the peoples of those times, their racial heritage and objects of material culture. The images are an important testimony on geological and cilmatic changes that transformed this region, which once harboured rivers, lakes and savannas, and which over a course of several millennia, turned into the largest desert in the world.

Parallel to rock and cave art, the graphic adornment of the body was also practised and reached its perfection on the African continent. Regardless of the aestetics of the decoration, jewellery or clothing that people wore, the body itself was approached as an art form – body as sculpture, or body as picture, filled with an inexhaustible imagination and creativity. A classification of practices in the realisation of body art that was typical in certain parts of the continent shows two types of interventions made on the human body: temporary (pictures in colour) which are short-lived, and permanent (scarifications, or incisions and tattoos) that mark the body until it cesses to exist. In the majority of cases body art was subjected to generalised criteria that did not refer solely to the field of individual creativity, but, primarily, to the expression of a group set in a specific social context.

Until recently rejected and despised by the „civilised world“, body art seems to correspond with modern fashion trends as an ideal in the search for the root identity of modern people.