Exhibition “Documenting Africa: The Travel Lens of the Caravan of Friendship” at the Museum of African Art in Belgrade

The exhibition “Documenting Africa: The Travel Lens of the Caravan of Friendship” will open on Thursday, November 27 at 6 p.m. at the Museum of African Art in Belgrade

The exhibition will be open to visitors until April 13, 2026, and the author of the display is Milica Naumov, curator at the Museum of African Art.

In early 1962, at a moment when parts of the African continent were undergoing deep geopolitical changes and emerging from the era of colonial administrations, a group of travelers embarked on a months-long journey through Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and Tanganyika. The expedition, titled the Caravan of Friendship and led by Tibor Sekelj, was created out of the belief that encounters between people can create spaces of understanding—not only on the level of intergovernmental and official politics, but through the exchange of views and words; through frames captured in motion by these self-organized travelers.

The exhibition “Documenting Africa: The Travel Lens of the Caravan of Friendship” at the Museum of African Art opens this journey through the eye of Filmske novosti cameraman Branko Marjanović—a member of the expedition whose photo album today serves both as a document and a personal diary; a testimony of an era, but also an invitation to read the echoes of his explorations across landscapes still uncharted by his lens. The camera in his hand recorded scenes of a continent in transformation, as well as traces of his own curiosity, attentiveness, and the things that are (im)possible to “frame.”

The exhibited photographs, film recordings, and travel objects testify not only to a single undertaking, but also to the ways of seeing and documenting. How did the participants of this expedition see Africa, and how did they understand their own place within it? Where, and if at all, do idealism and political reality meet in that gaze—fascination with the unfamiliar and the attempt to understand? The exhibition invites us to read the material from the journey as points of encounter—between documents and memories, between what was recorded and what was imagined.

Carefully assembled, Branko’s photo album—kept for decades solely as a family keepsake—now becomes, together with the objects from the journey, part of a kind of cabinet of memories: an archive in which public and personal history intertwine, professional testimony meets the intimate need to record and preserve. This is perhaps where the essence of the Caravan is revealed most clearly—not as a “mission” but as a process of exploration, in which the preserved memorabilia speak not only of the world shaped in the 1960s but also of us today—of our ways of seeing and interpreting.

“Documenting Africa” is therefore not only a story of a completed journey but an invitation to continue walking its traces—between past and present, between personal and collective memory, between the gazes that once “documented” and those that today “read” them.