This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Photo taken from kcb.org.rs
This article was developed within the program Venture an Idea funded by the USAID.
Gone are the days when male-made art was the only talk of the town. The contemporary cultural landscape in Serbia is shaped as much by female artists as their male counterparts, even more so in some respects. Names like Marina Abramović, Olja Ivanjicki, or Nadežda Petrović - whom you may know from 200RSD bill, have a special ring to them, having exhibited in most prestigious museums and galleries worldwide.
But rather than going that far, let's stay in Belgrade and meet the creme of the crop women artists whose work is currently on display.
Rules? It has to be a solo exhibition.
Kristina Bajilo - Superposition (Youth Center Gallery)
There are very few artists so eager to break away from romantic notions of human-centered mode de vivre than Kristina Bajilo. Her art has that artificiality, that aloofness from life that the best of pop art needs must convey; it exists somewhere in the crevices between ads and our perceptions of them, between the consumerist abundance and the emptiness thereof.
Bajilo's current exhibition, titled Superposition, fleshes out her artistic forte in the most vibrant of ways. In a playful manner worthy of Warhol, she pins the exuberant promise of a better future against the stark realization that it never came to pass. If you're into retro-futuristic, 90s web art, glitch art, and superflat aesthetics, then this show is a must-visit.
Ought to hurry, though; it ends on March 24th.
Ana Vujović ▪︎ BOTANICA FUTURA, BOTANICA NOVA (Cultural Center of Belgrade)
Similar to Bajilo, Ana Vujović also explores the meeting points between the natural and the artificial. However, she allows the element of natural existence; it just blends with the artificial to the point where no one's sure which overpowers which.
In BOTANICA FUTURA, BOTANICA NOVA exhibition, Vujović creates a futuristic garden where all plants have a pigment of plastic within them. The garden thrives on an amalgamation of natural plants infused with plastic, rubber, and other synthetic materials to the point that they, the plants, couldn't survive without them. In this exhibition, Vujović comes up with a new life form that lives but not quite, offering a poignant commentary on our present condition.
Biljana ÄurÄ‘ević - The Last Supper (Art Residence and Hestia Gallery)
The most humanistic of the three, Biljana ÄurÄ‘ević reinstates the contemporary human into the center of her art. But there's a twist. In an ontological reversal of the highest order, ÄurÄ‘ević presents the human condition by having no human figure on the canvas. There are no heroes in her art, no one to save the world. Just absence.
In this mock epic project, Biljana ÄurÄ‘ević tackles the problem of humanity from the point of its exhaustion. The human collective body is battered by industrialization, instrumentalization, and all those multi-syllable words so maliciously invented to break our spirits. Her paintings feature beds, chairs, and utensils inside abandoned schools, hospitals, and psychiatric clinics. The people, even the patients, have long left the scene.
Biljana ÄurÄ‘ević also happens to be a trailblazing muralist, with public artworks gracing buildings all over the city.
This article is made possible by the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents of this program are the responsibility of Nova Iskra and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government