The history of Galeb is a fascinating story of the 20th century, of its belief in the power and beauty of the machine and industry, of heroism of the ship’s crews regardless of the flags they sailed under and the countries they fought for, of ideologies that took turns in one and the same physical framework, of a warship turned into a peace ship, of a vision of an alternative world order, of the continuous cycle of new beginnings, of the glamour of socialism, of the leader. Specific angles of this story come to light in Alberto Guglia’s texts on the ship’s engineering and navigational history, in Tvrtko Jakovina’s writing on Galeb’s voyages through the seas of world politics, in Feđa Vukić’s account on the evolution of its symbolic meanings, and Ješa Denegri’s analysis of reasons and reaches of political standpoints on the area of artists’ activities on one particular example.

“Standstill” is an exhibition that deals with the deconstruction of the untouchable, of the mythical ship Galeb whose decks and salons along with Marshal Tito and the elite of socialist state and military government are inhabited by ghosts of world statesmen from Winston Churchill, Paul of Greece, Elizabeth II, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ahmed Sukarno, General Abboud, Kwame Nkrumah, Albert Tabnen, Habib Bourguiba, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, U Nu, Ne Win, Modibo Keita, Seku Ture, Archbishop Makariosa, Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Kurt Josef Waldheim, Nicolae Ceausescu, Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi and many, many others to scientists and artists as well as international movie stars such as Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Sofia Loren and Kirk Douglas. At the same time “At a Standstill” offers a model for a new social reconstruction of Galeb in the 21st century and a new paradigm on how to use the historical stages which we inherited and to which we lucidly awarded the status of a cultural good as a space and platform for an open, democratic dialogue and cool-headed overview of our history in the 20th century.

Branko Franceschi