Matija Brumen / Galeb

“The Galeb was, and I say this with complete confidence, a prop – a stage effect. A mobile film set. Tito used it for film scenes – for Hollywood moments such as his meeting with Winston Churchill or Queen Elizabeth. In Colombo, he hosted a plenary meeting of 150 statesmen and their retinues – as if were filming his own version of the Great Gatsby. It is hardly surprising that he also hosted actual Hollywood stars on the Galeb – Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Kirk Douglas to name a few. [...]

Everyone in Yugoslavia did everything in their power to make Yugoslavia look like a film, but a country that is turned into a film falls apart when the film ends. When Yugoslavs decided that they would no longer be “characters” in a film, the war began, a war that reduced to ruins the famous room where Tito watched all those movies. The Galeb, one of the many focal pointers of Tito’s illusionism, was also reduced to ruins. [...]

Brumen’s photographs show both the remains and the backdrop of something that has vanished. But what vanishes suddenly never dies. When Brumen shoots Galeb’s fragments –  cracks in history that cannot die and so function as allegory, irony, perversion, infection, provocation, protest, pornography, parody of the past socialist lust for “purity” –  he records history captured in the rearview mirror. The rust you see is closer than it appears. The Galeb, metaship of souls, could just as well have been called India Song, Great Expectations, or Sunset Boulevard. It still polarizes post-socialist society (partisans versus collaborators). The feeble twilight fragments that once held Yugoslavia together (or the film of Yugoslavia, if you prefer) continue to collide with past, present, and future.” – Marcel Štefančič Jr.

Language: Slovenian, English
Size: 26 × 38.5 cm, 32 pages
Binding: leporello, foil stamped cover
Publisher: The Angry Bat, 2021