The research will result in five exhibitions, consisting of artworks from the four museum collections and the two art archives; they will take place in four European museums (Moderna galerija, MACBA, M HKA and Van Abbemuseum).

Even though all four museums have vast collections of artworks from the 20th and 21st centuries, the works included in the exhibitions will predominantly belong to the post-war avant-garde art practices, including performative practices, new media, political activism, and visual poetry from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, as well as some other art practices with strong social utopian imaginary. The selection of the works will try to link the narratives of these museums in rhizomatic ways. 
The concept of the exhibitions is based on the idea of museum collections being important agents in building not just predominant narratives but also their alternatives. What the four museums have in common is their subversive potential that can be realised through the participation of the public spheres. Their collections are also the result of the needs of their local spaces for constant knowledge production against the tendencies of the hegemonic institutions.

With a precise selection of works from the period from 1957 to 1986 the exhibitions will visualise different social and political situations in which the historicisation of certain art practices was impossible. The exhibitions will try to visualise the potential of art institutions to break the illusion of a coherent historical narrative and will serve as a negotiator between different narratives, which means that their final goal is not a new coherent story consisted of “known and unknown” histories but an actuality that can never be repeated. The four museums are building four presentations of their collections, which, through their own actualities, are continually interrupting themselves.

Instead of the idea of every institution “expanding” its collection with a presentation of the new common collection created in “one big show”, the three exhibitions with the working title 1957–1986. Art from the Decline of Modernism to the Rise of Globalisation will be created separately in three partner museums (Moderna galerija, MACBA, Van Abbemuseum and M HKA), and complemented by two less extensive exhibitions, those of the Kwiekulik and Július Koller archives (Van Abbemuseum, M HKA). The one in M HKA will be contextualised with the archive of Jef Geys, a Flemish artist of the same generation.

Each of the three main exhibitions will have a different perspective, and will be curated separately. In that way every curatorial team will work on the subject of post-war avant-gardes from a different cultural premise.

To gain the most of the public attention the two major exhibitions in Ljubljana and Barcelona and two archive exhibitions in Eindhoven and Antwerp will happen almost at the same time. The third major exhibition in Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and M HKA will open in 2012.

Every individual exhibition will be accompanied by individual education and communication programmes as well as with exhibition guides in the local languages.