 May 9 - Sept 8

 Ljubljana

The Slovenian Ethnographic Museum is marking the 60th anniversary of the Museum of Non-European Cultures with two exhibitions about international cooperation and personal stories during the period of the Non-Aligned Movement .

The exhibition Intertwined Worlds: The Non-European Collections in the Time of the Non-Aligned Movement focuses on the Non-Aligned Movement period, which connected many independent countries, mostly with a colonial past, that emerged after the Second World War.

Socialist Yugoslavia, one of the movement's founding countries, established political, economic, and scientific links with developing countries in that period.

The display sheds light on the exhibition activities of the Museum of Non-European Cultures, the first Yugoslav institution dedicated to collecting and exhibiting ethnological objects from other continents, which operated between 1964 and 2001 as a dislocated unit of the Ethnographic Museum in the baroque Goričane manor near Medvode. Since 2001 the museum's collections have been occasionally displayed at the Ethnographic Museum.

Tina Palaić, one of the two authors of the exhibition, told the newspaper Dnevnik that collecting exhibits from non-European countries by missionaries, travellers and merchants had started early, and in 1821 the Provincial Museum of Carniola was founded. The first exhibition presented items collected by missionary Friderik Baraga from the Great Lakes area in North America in 1837.

The Museum of Non-European Cultures hosted exhibitions of collections brought here by diplomats, representatives of Yugoslavian companies that operated in other countries, travellers and students.

The other exhibition, Voyage of Memories Across Landscapes of Algeria in the 1960s, by Nina Zdravič presents the Berber arts and crafts as the carriers of memories interwoven with the stories of people and places.

Unique scenes of Algerian landscapes are featured in the exhibition video projection - a garland of old slides and photographs, alongside exhibits such as jewellery, carpets, pottery, copper products and clothes, and a small collection of original black and white artistic photographs of the desert, taken in 1965 by Algerian photographer Abdeslam Khelil.