Two jubilee exhibitions, Threads of Continuity and The Museum Through Time, organized by the National Museum of Montenegro to commemorate the 130th anniversary of its founding and the 100th anniversary of the restoration of its work, will open on Monday, 11 May, in Cetinje.
The official opening ceremony will take place at 7 p.m. in front of the “Miodrag Dado Đurić” Art Gallery of Montenegro at Balšića Pazar, while the artistic programme will be held at 8 p.m. in Njegoš’s Billiarda.
For the first time, the exhibition Threads of Continuity, hosted at the “Miodrag Dado Đurić” Art Gallery of Montenegro, will bring together all museum units of the National Museum as a single institution. The exhibition is based on the motif of the thread – a universal metaphor for continuity, memory, and interconnectedness. The thread symbolizes the link between material and spiritual culture, between people and time, and between the past and the present moment.
Each museum unit will occupy its own floor and have its own symbolic “tone”: the Archaeological Museum explores traces and the continuity of life; the Ethnographic Museum focuses on identity, community, and everyday life; the Historical Museum reflects on freedom and struggle through different eras; the Art Museum highlights imagination, creativity, and dialogue; while the Library and Archives Department connects all these segments through documents, manuscripts, and the written word as foundations of culture and freedom.
The second major exhibition, The Museum Through Time, will be presented in Njegoš’s Billiarda. Through authentic objects, documents, photographs, and multimedia content, it will trace the history of the institution itself—from Njegoš’s first collections in the 19th century, through the founding of the Museum in 1896 and its restoration in 1926, to the contemporary National Museum of Montenegro.
The exhibition will offer a journey through time, while also providing a glimpse behind the scenes into the work of curators, conservators, and all those involved in preserving cultural heritage. Conceived as a unique combination of archival and documentary materials with museum objects, it creates a multimedia environment that functions as a walk through history.
The chronological narrative of the exhibition spans the earliest ideas of collecting and presenting cultural material, the founding of the Museum, its institutional transformations, and its development into the present day, reflecting changes in the social, political, and cultural context. The displayed material includes objects from all museum units—artistic, historical, ethnographic, and archaeological artefacts—combined with archival documents, video recordings, photographs, posters, sound recordings, books, journals, and other materials.
Throughout the duration of the exhibitions, visitors will be able to attend guided tours, lectures on the history of the Museum, its collections and key artists, creative workshops for children and young people, as well as thematic workshops dedicated to cultural heritage preservation, restoration, and museum work.
The exhibition Threads of Continuity will remain on display until 11 October, while The Museum Through Time will be exhibited in the gallery space of Njegoš’s Billiarda throughout this year and the next.