GIVE TO TAKE / Intellectual Property Agency / QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Question by Stefano (Visitor)
Question:
Dear Ivana, since I found the resultes amazing, I d like to know more about financing of your gallery?
Answer by Ivana Blago, curator at Miroslav Kraljevic (g.mk.hr)
Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic has a specific position within the Croatian contemporary art scene. Whereas the scene is generally polarized between the state-owned and city-owned institutions that date from the time of socialism and the much more vibrant non-institutional scene that has started developing since late 1990's,
G-MK's position is somewhere in-between, or beyond these divisions. Developed from the socialist model of workers' cultural association withing large state companies (and the utopist idea of making workers not only consumers but also active participants in producing culture, as well as a way of controling their free time), the gallery Miroslav Kraljevic started out as the exhibition venue of amateur artists / workers of INA - one of the major oil companies in ex-Yugoslavia and now Croatia. Today, INA is a prosperous company on its way to become a fully privatised corporation, and it is still one of the sponsors of the gallery, the support being also a heritage from socialost times, and not a capitalist model of corporate investments and promotion through culture. The scope of this financial support is, accordingly, merely symbolic.
Other regular sponsors of the gallery program are the usual suspects / Ministry of Culture Croatia, Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb. Individual projects are sponsored by collaborations with foreign embassies in Croatia, collaborations with international partner institutions and EU cultural foundations. Most, almost all of the funding, is targeted at programming and production.
The situation here is very similar to what many NGO organisation in culture face - the lack of institutional financial support which, in our case, results in the fact that the gallery officially employs only one staff member - the director, which sounds absurd in every way, and especially regarding to the amount and diversity of the program we are producing.
