COURAGE

connecting collections

Juhan Aare (born in 1948) is an Estonian journalist and politician. He is best known as the host of the television programme ‘Panda’ on Estonian Television, which looked at environmental problems in Estonia and abroad. In the edition of the programme that was aired on 25 February 1987, he disclosed secret plans to open phosphorite mines in northern Estonia, which could have caused serious environmental problems. His appeal to the people of Estonia to write letters expressing their thoughts about these plans was effective, and unleashed a large wave of protest in Estonia in the spring of 1987, which is now known as the Phosphorite War. At the same time, he started to collect letters sent to him, and other material connected with the television programme ‘Panda’ and the Phosphorite War in general. In the 1990s he began to supplement the collection with raw material for his book about the Phosphorite War. The book Fosforiidisõda 1971-1989 (the Phosphorite War 1971-1989) was published in 1999. Juhan Aare presented his collection to the Estonian History Museum when the museum was preparing the exhibition ‘EI FOSFORIIDILE! 20 aastat fosforiidisõjast’ (No to Phosphorite! 20 Years since the Phosphorite War). He was also an advisor to the exhibition.

Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Belgrade. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1970 and continued post-graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, which she completed in 1972. Between 1970 and 1973, she took part in the shows and activities based at the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade with the Group of Six Artists. From the beginning of her career in the early 1970s, she was interested in performance as a form of visual art, using the body as a subject and medium. In her performances, she explored spiritual and physical endurance. She left Yugoslavia in the mid-1970s and moved to Amsterdam where she worked on performances together with her professional and personal partner, Ulay. They worked together for thirteen years. In their joint performances, they explored the parameters of power and subordination between themselves as artists and the public. After 1988, Abramović began to work and exhibit on her own. Today, Marina Abramović is an acclaimed performance artist internationally and has shown her work in leading museums worldwide. Since leaving Yugoslavia she has never returned, and today lives in New York.

The writer David Albahari was born in 1948 in Peja (Kosovo).

He studied English literature and language at the University of Belgrade. His first published book was a collection of short stories in 1973. Among various prizes for his work, the most important are the Ivo Andrić Award for the novel Opis smrti [Description of Death] in 1982 and NIN Award for the novel Mamac [Bait] in 1997. In between 1973 and 1994, Albahari worked in editorial board of many Belgrade and Novi Sad based magazines and publishing houses, such as Književna reč, Pismo, Kulture Istoka, Politika, Mezuza, Prva knjiga Matice srpske, among which the most important in the context of cultural opposition was the magazine Vidici.
Polja was among the first magazines to publish his stories. Albahari reflected on this on the fiftieth anniversary of the magazine, stating how much did this support mean to him. (Polja 435, September/October 2005).

His work has been translated into 14 languages. Albahari was translated among others by Nabokov, Updike and Shepard. Although he moved to Canada in 1994 with his family, Albahari does not consider himself a writer in exile and spends time in Serbia too.