About project

The Museum of African Art – the Veda and Dr Zdravko Pečar Collection (MAA) was founded in 1977 in Belgrade based on the collection created by the aforementioned benefactors during their several decades long cultural and diplomatic residence in different countries of the African continent.

As a unique institution in the region and beyond, through its work the MAA aims to develop and contribute towards a better understanding of the relations between Serbia (previously also the SFR of Yugoslavia) and African countries, as well as to further cultural exchange with individuals and institutions that research and promote the vast cultural heritage of the African continent.

In accordance with its founding principles the MAA grounds its work upon the following: the collecting, safeguarding and presentation of material culture, the promotion and publication of different publications, the preservation and record of documentary materials (library, photo, audio and video archives, documents, etc.) within its repositories.

Besides acquiring new objects to supplement existing museum collections and widen the scope of research, we continue to invest our efforts in the revalorisation of objects and other resources of the Museum. Such is the case with the photo, audio and video archival materials whose “re-discovery” is made possible due to the ongoing project “Digi-MAA – the digitalisation and presentation of photo, audio and video materials from the Pečar archive”. During 2016 thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, all of the conditions were met to begin the process of digitization. The “Digi-MAA” project was an excellent opportunity to document, analyse and present the otherwise inaccessible materials, and present them on a separate web site, thus making them available to the wider public. The content on www.digimau.org is an invitation of sorts to the public to deepen its interest, further its research and discover the potentials the MAA as an institution harbours.

In the year in which we are celebrating forty years of our existence and continuous work in the field of museum practice we have composed a website with a choice of photographs from the Veda and Zdravko Pečar photo-archive. These examples are presented for the first time and we hope that through them we will achieve our goal which is to emphasise this rich and valuable documentation, and draw the attention of the public to the importance of the institution in which we work.