When the young Miodrag Đurić aka Dado settled, around 1952, in the garret of the house of his maternal aunt Vukica Milosavljević, aka Vule, in Strahinjića Bana Street in Belgrade, he had already rebelled, breaking from the socialist realism imposed on him at the Fine Arts School of Herceg-Novi (1948–1952), where his maternal uncle, Mirko Kujačić, who had taken him in at the death of his mother in January 1945
The struggle for the recovery of the Serbian state – “the resurrection of the Serbian state”, as the national liberation struggle of the Serbian people was called by famous Stojan Novaković in the eponymous study from 1904, celebrating the centennial of the First Serbian Uprising. This struggle was initiated by the Serbian revolution in 1804 and ended at the Congress of Berlin in 1878.
I faced my work, as well as with myself, with apprehension. As the curator of the collection of Yugoslav Painting of the 20th century in the National Museum of Serbia, I committed myself to safe accommodation, processing and exhibiting the works I was in charge of, as well as to finding an answer to the question: Why doesn’t the oldest and most respectable museum institution among the Serbs have the collection of Serbian painting of the 20th century?
The word “camp” refers to restricted freedom, imprisonment, the power of the one who runs the camp over the one who is imprisoned in it, coercive control of the victim, abuse, killing… Just as people are imprisoned and taken to the camp, the powerful ones in the world try to “imprison” history by exercising violence over people in order to change their minds, and equality there is violence against history in order to alter it...
The third decade of the 21st century shows us to what extent our civilization is sensitive, fragile and tragic. Despite all technological accomplishments made by civilization in the second half of the 20th century and in the past two decades of this century, we realize that we have not progressed as much as we have convinced ourselves that we have.
