A ground-breaking exhibition on life in Croatia during the 1960s opened to the public on Thursday at the Museum of Arts and Crafts (MUO) in Zagreb.

The exhibition, designed to be a centrepiece of this year’s programme at MUO, looks at how ordinary Croatians lived through one of the key periods of the 20th century.

At the grand opening, and against the background of 1960s pop songs, curator Zvonko Makovic said the interesting thing was to show how the sentiment of the 1960s was diametrically opposed to the present day.

“Right now, we constantly talk about some crisis, depression, stress, lack of energy, and in comparison the sixties were teeming with optimism, everyone believed that achieving the impossible was actually possible, there was no (cultural) recycling, everything was innovative,” Makovic said.

The exhibition fills 12 halls inside the MUO, and includes over a thousand carefully curated exhibits loaned from five countries and 84 private collectors. Around 200 curators and experts worked several years to prepare the project for the public.

The opening gala gathered hundreds of Croatian celebrities of the era, including TV presenters, artists, writers, and film-makers.

“The sixties were a turning point, it was a time when social paradigms were changing, a time of restoration that laid the groundwork for the world we live in today,” MUO director, Miroslav Gasparovic, said.

The exhibition is divided into 18 sections that focus on various aspects of 1960s culture in Croatia, ranging from social and political movements of the time and the rise of consumerism, to visual arts, product design, photojournalism, architecture, pop music and fashion.

The exhibition will be open until September 30.

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