This is a translation of the about page from the site for Belgrade Cultural Center. Visit EXPOBLVD for a 360 degree map of the award-winning solo exhibition of Asako Shiroki, which was installed in October 2019 in the fine art gallery in the Center.
In its long and rich history Belgrade Cultural Center has never abandoned its primary mission to promote the highest artistic, cultural and societal values and to support advanced creative work, research and experimentation on the domestic and the international scene. On this trajectory only the important aesthetics and themes changed in harmony with the spirit and needs of the times, which the Center has consistently been quick to recognize and has confronted with bravery.
Today the Center is a dynamic cultural institution in which many ideas, poetics, practices and media in varying creative fields intermingle and are contextualized on a daily basis, merging into a unique program which gives the Center a particularly vibrant and powerful profile. The Center celebrates the contemporary moment, relying on an understanding of the past while preparing to expand into the future.
Precisely because it is not a museum or an institution for the preservation of cultural heritage, the Center enjoys the privilege to risk a step into the unknown, into investigation and experimentation which also promises that its unique programs offer productive values, the talents of the young and emerging, the old, the new. Lectures, workshops, discussions, courses, exhibition tours and other projects are valuable intermediaries for comprehending an exciting world of creation, with an emphasis on contemporary concepts, practices and media, for professionals and a wider public, and particularly for a new generation.
Belgrade Cultural Center is a true center for all the arts except theater, though in its own alternative form of expression theater is regularly present in the activities of the polyvalent program in this house of art and culture. With its formula of ‘many arts under one roof’, its attractive location right in the center of Belgrade, the Center is a necessary stop in encountering the city. It is an active and dynamic initiator and an always present and reliable place of support for cultural life in Belgrade, and whose operations connect this European capital with many points on the cultural map of the world.
We are celebrating 60 years of Belgrade Cultural Center as a unique source and dependable stronghold of urban culture in Belgrade. The Center has existed for decades in support of advanced practices, pushing the boundaries of creativity, constantly nurturing open critical dialogue, plotting new standards of production and organization, and conquering new spaces for art and culture.
The Building
The building of the Press Center, in which Belgrade Cultural Center is located on the ground floor and the first floor, was designed by the architect and urban planner Ratomir Bogojević (1912-1962), one of the outstanding figures of modern architecture in Belgrade. The Press Center building was ‘conceived and constructed in a completely classical manner, supplemented by the existing Reunion Palace and the Foreign Chamber of Commerce, and rounds off an ensemble of representative city palaces’[1] on Republic Square.
[1] Dijana Milašinović-Marić, Guide to Modern Architecture in Belgrade, DAB, 2002.