Exhibition Opening
RECORDING AFRICA: THE TRAVEL LENS OF THE CARAVAN OF FRIENDSHIP
November 27, 2025 – April 13, 2026
Exhibition Opening: Thursday, November 27, at 6:00 p.m.
Exhibition Curator: Milica Naumov
At the beginning of 1962, as parts of the African continent were undergoing profound geopolitical transformations and emerging from the era of colonial rule, 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 born out of a belief that encounters between people can create spaces of understanding—not only on the level of ntergovernmental or official politics, but through the exchange of glances and words; through the frames captured by these self-organized travelers in motion.
The exhibition “Recording Africa: The Travel Lens of the Caravan of Friendship” at the Museum of African Art opens this journey through the eyes of Film News cameraman Branko Marjanović, a member of the expedition whose photo album today stands as both document and personal diary—a testimony to an era, but also an invitation to read the echoes of his explorations through landscapes yet unexplored 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 limits of what can, or cannot be “framed.”
The exhibited photographs, film footage, and travel objects do not testify merely to one endeavor, but to ways of seeing and recording. How did the participants of this expedition perceive Africa, and how did they understand their own place within? Where, and to what extent, do idealism and political reality, fascination with the other and the attempt to understand intersect in this regard? The exhibition invites visitors to read the material from this journey as points of encounter—between documents and memories, between what was recorded and what was imagined.
Carefully composed, Branko’s photo album—kept for decades as a private family keepsake —now, together with the objects from the journey, becomes part of a kind of cabinet of memory: an archive in which public and personal histories intertwine, professional testimony meets intimate urge to document and preserve. Perhaps it is here that the essence of the Caravan reveals itself most clearly—not as a “mission,” but as a process of searching, in which preserved memorabilia speak not only of the world shaped in the 1960s, but also of us today—of our ways of seeing and interpreting.
Recording Africa is therefore not merely a story about a completed journey, but an invitation to continue walking in its footsteps—between past and present, between personal and collective memory, between the gazes that once “recorded” and those that now “read.”
