Serbian contemporary art without borders

About the emerging art scene in Belgrade and Mrdan Bajic's exhibition at MoCaB.

Did you know that Serbia is a booming scene in the field of contemporary art? This is what the contemporary art magazine Artpress, which regularly focuses on foreign scenes, has devoted its November 2022 issue to Serbia in general, and Belgrade in particular. According to Maja Kolaric, curator and director of the MoCaB, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, "Serbia has a lot to offer the art world, but the world knows very little about it: the presence of Serbian art on the international scene does not do justice to its qualities. For even though some Serbian artists, such as Marina Abramovic, a pioneer of body art born in 1946 in Belgrade, have managed to build up a reputation beyond the country's borders, the world of Serbian art galleries is indeed only beginning to appear, slowly but surely, at modern and contemporary art fairs.

However, as Maja Kolaric points out, "conceptual artists or performers trained in Serbia have made a lasting impression on the world's artistic life". She cites Katalin Ladik, one of the most eminent representatives of experimental art in the former Yugoslavia and Hungary, and her younger sister Tanja Ostojic, whose poster inspired by Courbet's The Origin of the World ironically suggested that foreign women were only welcome in Europe if they removed their underwear, causing a scandal in 2005. Two artists "whose practices address issues of sex, gender, equality and feminism, courageously and openly articulating their fears and needs, attacking the idealised patriarchal image of their country," writes Maja Kolaric. Two artists who also never hesitate to speak out for human rights and for an unfettered sexual and gender identity.

"In other media as well, the personal experience - sensitive by definition - of Serbian artists, whose childhood and adolescence were marked by war, has given rise to representations of human suffering, fear and the pain of uprooting, for example in the work of great artists who have left their mark on French culture, such as Dado or Vladimir Velickovic," emphasises the director of MoCaB. Dado is the pseudonym of the Montenegrin painter, draughtsman, engraver and sculptor Miodrag Duric (1933-2010), who was spotted by Jean Dubuffet when he arrived in Paris in 1956. Dubuffet introduced Dado to the famous art dealer Marcel Cordier, who made the painter world famous by taking care of his works of art for sale.

However, it is the medium of performance art, heir to a powerful conceptual tradition, that has retained an important role in the practice of many young artists, who work in both the traditional mediums of contemporary art and new ones such as visual effects, animation and video game art, which seems to be enjoying a privileged period in Serbia at the moment, says Maja Kolaric. Citing the famous radical and powerful solo performances by Sanja Latinovic, born in 1983 in Serbia and living and working in Belgrade, but also mentioning the artworks of Sonja Radakovic, Ivana Ranisavljevic, Nemanja Ladic, Marta Jovanovic, Marina Markovic and many others, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade stresses that "most of them deal with the complexity of the functioning of the individual within today's world: Constraints, imperatives and social pressures are thus often metaphors for the conditions and processes characterising society.

Exhibition spaces have also flourished in Serbia, and with them a multitude of alternative cultural proposals. In addition to established spaces such as the Remont Art Gallery in Belgrade, which has been bringing Serbian and Balkan art for sale together for several decades, new spaces such as G12 Hub, the Magacin Cultural Centre and its Ostavinska Art Gallery, the Kvaka 22 collective, as well as numerous private art galleries such as Zvono, Haos, RIMA, BelArt, U10, Novembar, X Vitamin, Eugster, Manifesto or NGVU have been added. International cultural exchange platforms that brought their artworks to the attention of the public for sale beyond the borders of their country to young artists, such as Vladimir Miladinovic, Vuk Cuk, Sas Tkacenko, Ivana Ivkovic, Emir Sehanovic, Marija Sevic, Nemanja Nikolic, Nina Ivanovic or Lidija Delic.

Among the Serbian art galleries integrating an artist residency programme, the MoCaB director points out in her article for Artpress the one founded in the centre of Belgrade in 2017, Hestia, "with the aim of creating an intercultural dialogue between the art scenes of the Global South, too often excluded from the dominant art world discourse". For in addition to an exhibition space for works of art for sale, "Hestia offers accommodation for artists in residence, as well as a library whose catalogue provides a valuable overview of contemporary art in Latin America, the Middle East or the Balkans". Clément Bedel, Daniel Garcia Andujar, Ana Vujovic, Louis-Cyprien Rials, Mark Pozlep, Vangjush Vellahu, Branislav Nikolic, Radenko Milak, Domingos de Barros Octaviano, Jorge Marin, Natasa Kokic, Nicolas Grum or the collective diSTRUKTURA have been exhibited there.

"The latest contemporary art gallery in Serbia, DOTS, in the immediate vicinity of Kalemegdan Park in the centre of Belgrade, has just announced its inaugural programme with an exhibition by the world star Kiki Smith: Humans and Other Animals", Maja Kolaric tells us. She also mentions the October Salon, which has become the Belgrade Biennial, where since 2007 an international jury has awarded "the October Salon prize, generally considered the most prestigious prize for artistic creation in the former Yugoslavia", before going on to develop a few fascinating paragraphs about the institution she directs, certainly the most important in the field of contemporary art in Serbia: the famous MoCaB, or Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. It must be said that the architectural jewel that is the modernist building created by Ivan Antic and Ivanka Raspopovic, built in 1965 at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, on the basis of a modern art gallery inaugurated in 1958, is worth a visit.

Reopened to the public in 2017 after a renovation so extensive that it required a complete reconstruction, the MoCaB hosts prestigious exhibitions in addition to being an exceptional archive and documentation centre on all the major artistic phenomena and practices in the cultural space of the former Yugoslavia from the mid-20th century to the present day. After the Marina Abramovic retrospective, The Cleaner, in 2019-2020, and this summer's Erwin Wurm exhibition, One Minute Forever, one of the most important and ambitious events devoted to the Austrian artist, the MoCaB presents a retrospective of Mrdan Bajic until 23 January 2023. The immense work of this prolific artist, who started out as a sculptor in Belgrade in the mid-1980s, is displayed on all five floors of the museum.