Changed View. Drawings from the Dachau Concentration Camp (1944-1945) by Vlasto Kopač

The National Museum of Contemporary History (further: the Museum) houses 78 precious drawings created in the Dachau Concentration Campby Vlasto Kopač (1913–2006), a well known Slovene architect, self-taught artist, honorary member of the Slovene Alpine Association, alpinist, conservator of cultural heritage and writer. His drawings are among those rare works of art created still during the operation of the Dachau Concentration Camp, between 1944 and 1945, since every artistic creativity which would reveal the inhuman conditions in the camp was strictly forbidden.

The Museum has collaborated several times with the Memorial Museum  of the Dachau Concentration Camp (KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau) in  Dachau, Germany, in presenting works of art from the Dachau concentration campby Slovene artists.

In 2012, on the initiative of the KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, the result of the collaboration between the two museums was the exhibition accompanied by the catalogue, Blickwechsel – Vlasto Kopač zeichnet das Konzentrationslager Dachau (1944–1945) („Changed View. Drawings from the Dachau Concentration Camp (1944-1945) by Vlasto Kopač“), which was on view in Dachau between April 27 and September 2, 2012. Apart from some items from the personal collection of Mrs. Mojca Kopač, Vlasto Kopač’s daughter, the authoress of the exhibition, Dr. Michaela Haibl, chose 30 original drawings by Vlasto Kopač from the art collection of the National Museum of Contemporary History. Thus, the Kopač’s drawings returned to the place where they were once created, in memory of the Dachau concentration camp and as a reminder to all those who took a look of them in the Dachau museum.  This was also the intention of Vlasto Kopač who created the drawings – to document that incredibly tragic and inconceivable everyday life in the concentration camp, to preserve the drawings as a proof of what was happening and to remind us that we should never forget. Dr. Haibl says: »Vlasto Kopač’s drawings are both exceptional documents of artistic resistance activities and visual archive on everyday life in the Dachau concentration camp between January 1944 and its liberation on April 29, 1945«.

The conception of the exhibition, Changed View. Drawings from the Dachau Concentration Camp (1944-1945) by Vlasto Kopač“, on view in the Museum in Ljubljana, is the same as it was in the museum in Dachau; only the drawings are differently displayed and there are some items from the Museum’s collections added to the exhibition. The selected 30 Kopač’s drawings are sorted into four thematic sections (block and barrack, portraits, terror and forced labour, torture and death) accompanied by the texts by Dr. Michaela Haibl.

The scene of the creation of the Kopač’s drawings from the period between 1944 and 1945, and the 2012 Dachau exhibition is briefly presented in a short film recorded in Dachau in 2012. The exhibition which will be on view at the Museum until June 1, 2013, has been prepared to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of Vlasto Kopač’s birth and the 68^th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.

Photo: “Pogled iz knjigoveznice” [kazenski oddelek pri delu] 14. 4. 1944,  perorisba s tušem, 10,4 x 14,8 cm