In 2015, on the initiative of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška and the sculptor and architect Boštjan Temniker, a group of three sculptures with the common title Memento by dr. Jožef Muhovič, painter and philosopher, long-time professor of art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, were placed in the park between today’s Vila Pohorje and the administrative unit, where the municipal administration had been after World War II until a few years after Slovenian independence. The relief cast iron objects were created already in 1993 and 1994, and were displayed in the atrium of the former city hall at Glavni trg already in 2008 within a large overview exhibition of Muhovič’s paintings in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška. From there they travelled in the same year to the platform in front of the Museum of Contemporary History in the Cekin Mansion in Ljubljana, where they were kept for a while. Professor Muhovič designed the sculptures as a meditation on the memorial of reconciliation of Slovenians, in which he asks himself how we see our dead, clearly pointing to those who were denied the right to a grave, thus robbed of their afterlife in the memory of the living. The three-part sculpture tells the story of the coffin, the cross and memory, with which a testimony of the so-called silenced victims of World War II is inscribed symbolically into its narrative.

Text: Marko Košan