Branka Benčić

Branka Benčić is a curator and art historian with research, writing and curatorial interests in contemporary art, exhibiting film and video, curatorial practices and exhibition histories. Currently she is the director of MMSU / MoMCA Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Croatia.

She curated the Croatian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and co-curated the Croatian Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). She co-founded and served as artistic director at Apoteka – space of contemporary art, and the Cinemaniac > Think Film project at Pula Film Festival. She has curated group exhibitions, solo projects and film screenings in Croatia and internationally, lectured  on contemporary art practices and exhibiting film and video (TATE Modern, Interseccion Audiovisual Art festival, Film Curating at Oberhausen Seminar – International Short film Festival Oberhausen, Out of Sight Antwerp, MSU Museum of Contemporary Zagreb). She has published extensively on contemporary art in exhibition catalogues, books and journals.

Selected exhibitions:  Ride into the Sun – 3rd Industrial Art Biennial (2020, Istra, co-curated with Gerald Matt and christian Oxenius), REZ / CUT – Collage in Contemporary art, MSU Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2018), The Museum of Found Footage, Pula (2018), PROJECTIONS, MMSU Museum of Contemporary Art Rijeka (2017); Damir Očko Human Scale, MSU Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2019), Video Television Anticipation MoCA Belgrade (w/A. Sekulic) etc.

At NEMO’s European Museum Conference 2020, Branka Benčić will present the MoMCA - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in the special panel “Spotlight on Rijeka museums!” on 17 November.

MMSU Muzej moderne i suvremene umjetnosti / MoMCA Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMS MoCA), established in 1948 as Gallery of Fine Art, inhabited since 1956 in its long term premises on the second floor in Dolac Street, where it remained until 2017 when it moved to the current venue, a repurposed factory building of  a former industrial complex. The history of renaming the institution from The Gallery of Fine Arts, Modern Gallery, to current Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art reveals the change in perspectives and developments of institutional policies, mission and understanding of art, unfolding exhibition histories as institutional histories. In the recent perspectives of collaborative international projects, the museum took an active part in projects such as Culture of dopolavoro; Soft Control; Risk Change; Smuggling Anthologies exploring relevant issues in the global horizon.

As a long-term initiative of digitalization and circulation of knowledge, the museum collections (paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, posters, photographs, new media art, film and video) are accessible online. International perspective and collaboration, decentralization of art and culture, challenges and contradictions of the past and the future, the excitement of discovering new contemporary artists, the knowledge about the key works of the national art in dialogue with the international context… remain main trajectories of the museum concepts and methodologies.