You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It

The political camps on the islands of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur were established in 1949, after, in 1948, the Yugoslav state policy opposed the policy of the Informbiro, which was supporting the Russian domination. Conceived for the purpose of “re-education”, i.e. isolation and “neutralization” of political dissidents, the camp operated until 1956. During that period, over 13.000 men and 850 women were detained there.

Artist: Andreja Kulunčić

Curators: Irena Bekic, Anca Mihuleț

17 December 2024 – 31 January 2025

26 Popa Soare Street, Bucharest

The exhibition ”You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It” is a part of the project ”In(Visible) Traces. Artistic Memories of the Cold War”, initiated by Documenta in Zagreb and organized together with the Romanian Association for Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Blockfrei, Vienna and The Bautzner Straße Dresden Memorial, Dresden. The project aims to engage artists, researchers, educators, policymakers, and citizens in reflecting, preserving and discussing European cultural heritage, focusing on neglected Cold War-era historical sites.

Through artistic spatial interventions at the sites of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, exhibitions, a website, publications, and a series of workshops, reading groups and talks, the project deconstructs the deliberate amnesia concerning the history of women on Goli Otok to open a way through to memory. In doing so, it reaches for a subversive commemorative form – an anti-monument – which does not impose memory but seeks it in the constantly renewed permeation of disputed memories and the knowledge and feelings of the audience.


The exhibition is conceived as a place of different flows. It becomes an island, an island ambience, a place of remembrance, an island simulacrum, a conduit for existence, a link between a past event and memory: a space for reflection and complementary thinking containing visual materials – drawings, photographs and objects – some of the outcomes of the artistic research; a site for the gestural interpretation of the daily tortures endured by the women on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur in the form of a video installation; and a zone for participation, which includes making female figurines from clay. 

The figurines are made by the visitors of the exhibition, during a series of organized workshops or simply as a natural expression of their feelings after visiting the exhibition. It aims to deliver ways of activating memory, while participatory threads are constantly reconfiguring the mechanisms of understanding a marginal historical phenomenon.



As part of the project, the artist was the first, 64 years after the dissolution of the camp, who installed an information board at the Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur women’s prison sites. By doing so, Andreja Kuluncic takes on the role of decision-maker, re-establishing the necessary order of things, awareness, respect, and last, empathy. Through the display of a representative photograph of the plate on the gallery’s wall, the author re-establishes the identity of the place, showing that it is an established turning point and that the histories of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur can no longer be ignored.

Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past, founded in 2004 in Zagreb by four human rights organizations, researches war events, human rights violations, and war crimes, collects data, and monitors trials to improve judicial standards. Initially focused on the 1990s war in Croatia, its work expanded to address the entire 20th century, including World War II, Yugoslav socialism, and the 1990s conflicts in the whole region. Its mission is to shift discussions from factual disputes to meaningful interpretations, fostering reconciliation and addressing modern issues related to its core themes.

Exhibition views

You can download the curatorial text below.