Posters and Videos
Boris Ljubičić created most of his posters for the MDC on the occasion of International Museum Day (IMD). In addition to the design value, also confirmed by numerous awards, the semantic dimension is often placed in the foreground of his posters. It is important to “read”, interpret, and understand them within the framework of what they were created for, but also as a kind of commentary on the socio-political context in which they were created.
His works are visual proof of his viewpoint, also expressed in an interview in the journal Muzeologija 53, that “a designer must be responsible in space and time”. One example is the first poster in the series for IMD entitled A Jug Goes to the Well Until It Breaks, originally printed in 1991 and in the reissue for the 30th anniversary. The motif was designed two years earlier, and on it a photograph by Damir Fabijanić shows the fragments of a broken pitcher in the shape of continents, representing a spatial and temporal turning point on the eve of the political “rearrangement” of the world, until recently divided into the Eastern and Western blocs. In 1992, the first year in which ICOM organized the IMD celebration around a set theme, the IMD poster combined half of the face of a portrait sculpture The Woman from Salona and half of a Neanderthal skull into a whole, as an appeal to pay attention to the war in Croatia.
On the 1994 IMD poster, numerous ants symbolically write the letter “m” with their paths, their number representing the number of Croatian museums, but also the diligent museum workers who keep them in operation with their hard work. At the bottom of the poster, next to the date of the IMD, there is an ant representing the poster’s author. The 1996 IMD poster expresses the importance of current activities in museums for the future of cultural heritage, for the institutions that preserve it, and for humanity, with a clock in which the words “today for tomorrow” appear instead of numbers.
Even posters that are graphically impressive at first glance go beyond their aesthetics with a deeper meaning. The three-dimensional “accordion”-shaped poster, created for the 2000 IMD on the theme Museums for Peace and Harmony in Society, unites what is seemingly irreconcilable. On a white background, he harmoniously combines two different black shapes – a square and a circle. In this way, depending on the changing angle of view, he metaphorically reconciles Western (square) and Eastern (circle) civilizations. The idea behind the poster with a silver reflective background, created for IMD on the theme Museum Bridging Cultures in 2005, is to mirror its surroundings and, depending on them, to create a new image. The mirroring is twofold because the word “MUSEUM” is broken into three letters and vertically oriented with two letters “m” and two letters “u” placed in mirror images. On the 2006 poster, the word “MUSEUM”, which can only be read from a certain distance, was created by intersecting straight lines as computer graphics. He created the poster in white and black versions – one dedicated to IMD, and the other to Museum Night.
He has woven symbols of Croatian identity into some posters. Such is the case with the 1999 poster with images of a relief chessboard from the Church of St. Lucia, from which the Baška tablet originates, then with a poster depicting ties on the occasion of the IMD in 2002, a poster with the Sinj Alka from 2004, and the Croatian Apoxyomenos from 2009. On the penultimate poster, he juxtaposed the Alka and the Mercedes sign, seemingly similar in shape but essentially completely different – one as a symbol of intangible cultural heritage with a centuries-old tradition, the other as a contemporary symbol of material wealth.
Ljubičić's first poster for the IMD in 2003 was rejected. It depicted a male and female figure taking a step forward from a frog's perspective. The somewhat vulgar scene was deliberately supplemented with the grammatically incorrect inscription “wellcome to the museum”. Instead, Ljubičić's second solution was accepted – a poster with a photograph of a girl on the sidewalk drawing a very realistic eye. This eye, due to its position on the ground, is metaphorically pointed at the scene from the poster that was rejected.
The last poster that Ljubičić created for MDC on the occasion of IMD dates back to 2017 and was created in several colors and dimensions. The theme of the event was Museums and Contested Histories: Saying the Unspeakable in Museums. It features a photograph of hands moving the slats of a window blind, and more than half of the poster’s surface is occupied by a large inscription “WHY NOT?”. This is one of his ideas that he used a few years earlier – the photograph was created for the Chopin 200 poster from 2011, and it imitates the act of pressing piano keys.
To promote IMD, Ljubičić moved from posters to another medium, video, with his first creation created in the year 2014 as part of that event for the Weekend at the Museum campaign. In 2015, a video was created in which a man puts up a billboard with the inscription Museums for a Sustainable Society. He used the Croatica typeface, a variant of Helvetica with red and blue squares – symbols of Croatian national identity that he had conceived in the early 1990s. The following year, inspired by the theme Museums and Cultural Landscapes, he created a video in which tree leaves intertwine with the letters of the word “museum”. In this way, he symbolically opened up the boundaries of the museum and included nature.
Each of the twenty or so of his posters created for IMD, as well as the promotional videos, tell a story. It begins when we connect the artistic elements with the text, it continues by giving us space for our own associations and interpretation, and it unravels itself with the realization of the reasons and circumstances of the creation of the design solution. But it doesn't end there, because certain visuals can be used again and again due to the previously mentioned layering, symbolism and potential ambiguity, which we can see in the example of posters and publications.