The biggest art event in Belgrade and all of Serbia is the Salon happening in October. Founded in 1960, with the idea of presenting the best contemporary art in Yugoslavia. Now, it is a biannual exhibition, with a different concept every time, created by foreign or Serbian curators and it presents contemporary art from all over the world.

This year’s Salon is curated by the curating couple from Rejkjavik, Island - Danielle and Gunnar Kvaran. The title is The Marvellous Cacophony, which already tells us a lot about the concept. The idea that curators had was to show all the different voices that exist in the world of art - to show diversity and richness in contemporary art. The curators give us insight into art production from the USA to China and Japan, from Norway to Africa. It is also inclusive regarding different backgrounds of the artist, from technical sciences to art history, and also the age of artists. While some are well known, almost legendary artist that are already part of the art history, like Cindy Sherman, Yoko Ono, Anselm Kiefer or Larry Bell, others are emerging stars of the art world, like Taiwanese artist Korakrit Arunanondchai or British artist Helen Marten.

What is also cacophonic about the exhibition is that it aims to show many different topics - it covers historical perspective, personal histories, politics, religion, spirituality, nature, and technology. Arunanondchai’s work speaks about UN nations, costs of peace and his relationship with history, Ono is traditionally concerned with gender topics and position of women but also pacifism and antiviolence, Murakami is speaking about Daruma the Great, a Buddhist monk from the 6th century in a very witty way, Velickovic is concerned with universal theme - human violent nature and metaphysical horror, and Anicka Yi analyses how art incorporates both technology and nature in order to stimulate all senses and erase those borders between organic and artificial.

These artworks are done in various materials and techniques, from the assemblage of Arunanonchai, Romuald Hazoume, ambients of Pamela Rosenkrantz, ambient installations of Fernanda Gomez, to installations of Anika Yi, Nina Jovanovic, Ivan Grubanov, Tobias Madison, the interactive art of Marie-Ange Guilleminot and Yoko Ono, and classical mediums like painting (Kiefer, Lidija Delic, Kazumi Nakamura, Larry Bell), drawings (Bjarne Melgaard, Vladimir Velickovic), and sculptures (Marguerite Humeau, Ivana Basic, Xu Zhen).

It seems like the curators succeeded in their goal to exhibit the variety of genres, approaches, philosophies, and tendencies in art today. The Belgrade Biennale is envisaged as a grand festival of diversity, as the meeting point between different sensibilities, different means of artistic expression, different universes, as a place for exchanges with the public, who will also be received in all its diversity. As curators said: ‘Art embellishes, moves, amuses, soothes, teaches, bear witness, explains, recounts, anticipates, alarms, surprises, questions, engages, contests, disturbs, polemicises, provokes, invents, experiments, dreams, acts.’ These verbs illustrate that we cannot expect anything specific from art, it always gives us a different sensation, and this exhibition shows that art today, more than anytime before, reflect the plurality and contradictions of the word we live in.

The exhibition “Between ourselves–Connecting collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (1) and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Subotica”(2) opened on the 31st of August in the exhibiting place called Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art. This exhibition is a result of the collaboration of these two art institutions and serves as an example of good curatorial practice since it is creating a meaningful connection between two art collections. The curators of this exhibitions are Una Popović from Museum of Contemporary art and Nela Tonković from Contemporary Art Gallery and exhibited artist are Saša Tkačenko, Miloš Tomić, Mladen Bizumić, Nikola Savić, Žolt Kovač, Marta Jovanović, Maja Rakočević Cvijanov, Vesna Pavlović, and Ivan Grubanov. The purpose of this collaboration is to encourage networking of institutions, future curatorial projects and question valorization of art that is already part of collections, as well as contemporary art at the current art market. 

These two institutions were founded almost at the same time during the 1960s when the network of art and cultural institutions that collect and exhibit contemporary art was being established all over Yugoslavia. The Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in 1965 with the ambition to research and collect contemporary art. The Contemporary Art Gallery in Subotica was established in 1962, also with the aim of creating a collection. Collections of both of these art institutions illustrate how cultural policy of Yugoslavian institutions could and did recognize values of contemporary art quite on time. The Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art (situated right next to Academy of Fine Arts, in the very center of the Belgrade) from its beginnings shows the latest production and actively participates in creating and recognizing the value of contemporary art. 

The exhibition “Between ourselves”is actually a call of the Salon of MSUB to the Contemporary Art Gallery in Subotica to exhibit together certain acquisitions and gifts of artists that had already participated in either solo or group exhibitions organized by both of these institutions separately. The exhibition is thus an attempt to think about what do these two collections have in common. 

The Salon of MSUB exhibits: 

“Musical Diary #1” (2012, video) Miloš Tomić 

“Searching for pictures” (photo installation in the lightbox, 2011) Vesna Pavlović 

“This is my body” (sculpture, 2012) Marta Jovanović 

“Lunch” (oil on aluminum, 2007) and “Coffee in bed” (oil in aluminum, 2008) Žolt Kovač 

“First Epistle to the Corinthians by St Paul” (13:4, acryl on canvas, 2008) Nikola Savić 

“Memorial Bush” (oil on canvas, 2007) Ivan Grubanov. 

The Gallery in Suboticapresents: 

“Here and Now (Subotica)” (Fuji photo paper, 2013) Mladen Bizumić 

“Sugarloaf” (object, 2004) Maja Rakočević Cvijanov 

“Good people – Hard times – Bad habits” (installation in space, 2013/2018) Saša Tkačenko. 

Since all the exhibited art was made during the last decade or two, these exhibitions show what has been recognized and institutionalized as important contemporary art, and what tendencies exist in the art world lately. On one hand it shows intimate world of artist is being more and more present in their artworks, in a form of visual or another type of diaries (like artworks of Miloš Tomić or Žolt Kovač), or by dealing with personal issues like body image, identities, and status (like in sculpture of Marta Jovanovic). On the other hand, there is a strong tendency to be politically aware and engaged (like the art of Ivan Grubanov), which is not necessarily unrelated to personal issues or histories. By telling a story about themselves or their problems, the artist is pointing at various social phenomena often by making their art ironical and provocative (Saša Tkačenko). 

Artists work in all different artistic media, from painting to video art, objects, installations, and conceptual art, which shows that even inspire the old-fashioned program of education which Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade provide, artists are still finding their own ways of expressing creativity beyond these limits. Careers of named artists are developing not only in Serbia but also abroad, in Europe, USA, Australia, where they actively take part in various art shows(including Venice Biennale)or artistic residences all over the world from New York to Beirut. 

Websites of artists: 

The exhibition of Lidija Delić’s art installation opened in Dom Omladine (The Youth Centre) on the 9th of August. The West Island is an ambient installation in two rooms of the gallery, three walls in one and one wall in the other room. On the walls of the bigger gallery room, there are three conceptually connected landscapes - one is a dark blue painting of a lighthouse with the light slightly indicated with the accents of red, and on two walls that stand across each other, we can see video artworks. One video is showing a boat slowly coming to the marine, and on the other is the lighthouse that sends red light signals to a boat. Also, the whole room is dark blue with blue shadows and we can hear a signaling sound of the lighthouse. 

Navigation of the boat is represented as it is happening in real time and space. This ambient simulation of real geographical spot sucks in all the visitors into its atmosphere, in a landscape as the artist feel it. This personal view of a landscape, ambient with repetitive sounds of a lighthouse, and blue light all over the place don't leave visitors untouched. The length of the video requires longer stay in the gallery room, so the artist is giving us a sense of real time. The effect of sitting in that room for long is almost hypnotizing - the boat slowly coming to the harbor, blinking light and red signals of the lighthouse that appear in same intervals of time evoke feelings of melancholy, isolation, slow passing time, waiting and a feeling of a place that necessarily provokes the need for the contemplation.

The other room has shining stripes hanging from the wall with the blue light projected onto them. The whole room is dark so the visitor cannot have a sense of space, and each time someone tries to move they hit the wall. This part of the ambient gives the feeling of immobility and claustrophobia, but at the same time - if you don't move you can enjoy beautiful blinking stripes that move slowly creating this imaginary scenery.

Lidija Delic combined imaginary landscape with the actual topos in real space and time, so the firm border of what is the reality is lost. And in this possibility to transfer the exact atmosphere of the geographically specific location with the feeling that she gets by making the audience feel the vibe is a creative power of her artwork.

About the artist

Born in Nikšić, Montenegro in 1986. Lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. She earned her Ph.D. at the Multimedia Art Department, University of Arts in Belgrade, in 2015. Graduated at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Department of Painting, in 2010. She is a co-founding member of U10 art space in Belgrade, working on managing exhibitions and events.

Website: http://lidijadelic.com

In gallery for contemporary art, November in Belgrade opened the group exhibition dedicated to summer, and it will be open until the 9th of September. On this cheerful setting can be seen the works of Selene Vicković, Mario Kolarić, Emilija Radojčić, Marija Avramović, Miša Filipovac and Bratislava Milenković. The exhibition represents personal impressions and associations that this group of the artist has when they think about summer. This gives us the opportunity to see an everyday topic (almost a cliche) in an artistic context. It is the joyful ode to summer loves, summer vibes and of course, the seaside. In the original title Letnja treperenja, the word treperenja doesn't mean only vibes but literally fastly blinking when moving, which is a quite good description of a summer.

Drawing of Mario Kolaric is showing this blinking with his repetitive black and white geometric forms that are interrupted with some colorful blue red and yellow wavy lines. This abstract landscape seems like a jazzy illustration of blinking on the surface of the seaside, of the air on the surface of the concrete streets of the city. Artworks of Emilija Radojcic transfer the same waving and blinking vibe of the summer, with the numerous lines painted in clear resonant colors she creates fast and chaotic but at the same time clear scenery. The title of her work is Summer of Love I and II which is the witty and clear visualization of to all of us well-known feeling of summer madness, falling in love with someone new, euphoria and romanticizing someone. Summer vibes in the artwork of Bratislav Milenkovic are quite geometric, which is the consequence of his education on the department of graphics and book printing and design. He chose the symbolical forms of summer - a boat on the sea, a palm and the sun and reduced them to the recognizable geometric shapes. Selena Vickovic shows us the perspective of children but she does that by twisting the stereotypical idea of the innocence of children. She adds details or forms that surprise and confuse like the empty eyes of a girl. Her illustration can sometimes even give the feeling of grotesque and show us the dark side of a child’s imagination. Misa Filipovic paints a girl in the swimming pool sitting isolated from others while contemplating over the water surface. We all know how the calming moving of the waves and blinking spots on the water surface get us hypnotized. The landscape with two girls at the seaside are topics that Marija Avramović uses to show the carefree and cheerful vibe of the summer activities in the water and also call us to remember the childhood friends, games and first summer holidays spent on the seaside. 

The whole exhibition of wavy and blinking summer landscapes is there to remind us to relax and enjoy the chillness and euphoria of the summer, and that art is sometimes there to evoke this lightness when we usually tend to forget. 

About the artists 

Selena Vicković, born 1958 in Belgrade, finished bachelor studies in 1982 at The Faculty of Applied Arts, and then got the scholarship from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Did her M.A. on the Faculty of Applied Arts where she stayed as a professor. She had many exhibitions both collective and individual in Belgrade, Paris, Rome, Copenhagen, and Azerbaijan. She was awarded the prize of Salon of Contemporary Art in Montrouge 1999. godine. 

Mario Kolarić, born in 1984 in Beogradu, did bachelor studies at The Academia of Visual arts in Zagreb. He mainly works in the field of drawing, objects, and installations, creating an abstract narrative through basic visual shapes. He had several exhibitions on Balkans and in Europe. Member of Croatian Visual Artists Collective. Currently lives and works in Belgrade. 

Emilija Radojčić through her ritual dedication to the process of drawing and painting questions the feelings, vibes, nature, and various natural phenomena through which someone reflects his or her own state of mind. She works in the field of drawing, painting, objects, installation, performance and urban interventions. She exhibits in Serbia and abroad, and she had many projects, and audio-visual performances realized and exhibited at various group exhibitions. Currently lives and works in Belgrade. 

Marija Avramović, born in 1989 in Belgrade and currently lives and works in Paris. She has a bachelor degree from The Faculty of Visual Arts in Belgrade, and a master degree from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She focuses on drawing and painting but recently she also inquires space and materials through various art installations. She had three individual exhibitions and took part in numerous group exhibitions in Serbia, France, Germany, England, and Portugal. 

Mišo Filipovac, born in 1987. in Bajina Bašta, finished his studies in 2010 at FILUM (Faculty of Philology and Arts) in Kragujevac. He currently teaches at the same faculty as assistant professor. He is the Ph.D. student of The Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. He is exhibiting in Serbia and abroad. He works and lives in Belgrade and Kragujevac. 

Bratislav Milenković did his bachelor studies at The Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, department for Graphics and book design. He exhibited in Serbia and abroad, and his works can be found in many books, popular magazines, and other publications as New York Times, Guardian, Wired, GQ, Esquire, etc.

The November Gallery opened in April this year in center of Belgrade, and it mainly supports the work of young Serbian and regional artists. The purpose of this new art space is to reconnect local audience with artists (from Serbia and Balkans mostly) who are exhibiting in international galleries and lost their connection with the local community due to poor working conditions for artists. 

The exhibition The Ground is Gone (Kad nestane tlo) by Serbian artist Ivana Basic (Basic) opened in the November Gallery on the 7th of June and it is going to remain open until 30th of July. The artist is born in 1986, and grew up in Serbia during the wartime in the 90s, which influenced her choice of topics and the overall atmosphere of her artworks. She is currently based in New York, working as an international artist. Ivana had her solo exhibition in London Annka Kultys Gallery in 2016, several group exhibitions in London, East Hampton and Miami and this is her first exhibition in Belgrade. 

The exhibition consists of two big sculptures-installations done in various materials, several small forms hanging on the wall, which can also be described as done in mixed-media, and one video artwork presented in a separate room with no light. The moment spectator enters the gallery in front of her-him emerges a big hanging body, on the edge of being elegant and grotesque at the same time. It is named Stay inside or perish (2016) and done in wax, glass, pressure, oil paint, stainless steel, leather and elastic band. Deformed, bent backward, the armless and headless body is hanging from the ceiling while its legs are supported by the steel construction. Wax body is done in a realistic manner closely resembling living body with muscles skin and bones, but in the same time without an essential part of the living body – head and in color that gives the impression of marble sculpture. The work speaks about the limits – liminal spaces between life and death, reality and fiction, human and inhuman, pre-natal and post-mortem, nature and industry, naturalism and fiction, beauty and ugliness. When the look is turned to the left part of the gallery room there is contrasting but similar figure hanging. The other one is bent forward with arms pressing the head which is unrealistically bent almost to tights. The body has disturbingly extended, distorted legs, ending with horse hoof. The presented character, The Bridle, is an entity created by the artist which she explains in one interview for Artspace: 

Bridle is a character. She came out of trying to name and address these two forces that I have been employing in my work—one being this force that propels life forward and creates life, and the other one that suffocates life in order to bring its fragility to the surface. Those two things have always been present in all of the works, playing the role of both the blade and the wound. 

This fragility that she mentions is especially present in this hybrid, wounded bodies that cross the borders between living and dead. In her video work the animated character, with a body similar to the one in installations, is moving and bending unnaturally until it loses the human form. The look on the body in the video is causing feelings of disgust and unease, but simultaneously it fascinates and causes empathy. Her artworks seem to embody contemporary and already classical feminist theories about body and identity. When I observe works of Basic, visions of Donna Haraway from her Cyborg Manifesto comes to my mind. Harraway is speaking about new cyborg identities, based on postmodern realities which erase fixed meanings, stable states, and determined identities. Erasure of borders between human and animalistic, humans and machines and borders of physical space and body lead us to abandon the binary oppositions in defying meanings, bodies, life, and reality. Fiction and realness became one, contradiction became part of our identity, and the perception and understanding of the body quit the long-lasting cartesian dualism of body and mind. These deformed bodies present in Basic’s artworks clearly depict Harraway’s point, but they also evoke theories of the embodied subject, present in the works of Rosi Braidotti and Susan Bordo, corporeal feminism of Elizabeth Grosz and identity theories of Judith Butler and Wendy Brown. These feminist theoreticians emphasize the need to analyze bodily experience, to take into consideration lived subjectivity, embodied identities and differences. The depiction of the body in these artworks may also be analyzed through Michael Foucault’s theories of biopower and biopolitics, which speak about the discipline of the body through various institutional, collective or individual practices. The artist herself wrote a thesis on Mediating Bio-political body - Abandoned bodies in which she questions the relation of man and his body using Foucault’s theories. 

Remaining four sculptures are smaller hanging pieces from the series called Breath seeps through her tightly closed mouth from 2016, made from glass and steel. The glass is used in a humorous way that questions the materiality as such, and the title of the series seems like a witty comment of the artist on possibilities and conditions in which one lives and expresses oneself. 

Formally, her artworks evoke many different artistic traditions. Bridle seems to be a dialogue with Marcel Duchamp’s Bride, since both are entities that combine human body and machine and question the very essence of human identity. Also, they both use a similar type of humor in using materials, giving titles and mixing realistic traditions with abstract forms that are quite associative. The return to the body, both in humanistic studies and art, typical of postmodernism is present as an artistic tradition in the works of Basic. Thus, being able to communicate avant-garde humor and formal (neo)avant-garde tradition of mixed media with postmodern heritage, but also giving a fresh, contemporary insight into problems of body politics, identity, and gender, Ivana Basic offers the new inspiring perspective on bodily experience and embodied subjectivity in artistic form.