The Milky Way – art, time, space exhibition, which includes the works of over 40 artists and art groups from Novi Sad, Serbia, and the international art scene, throughout history, but also the inclusion of relevant ones of contemporary art practices, will be opened on November 25 at 7 p.m. in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina.

Some of the pioneers of media art and activism will be presented in Serbia for the first time. Among them is the American artist Bill Viola, the originator of video art, which he has been doing for over 40 years, creating specific environments that influenced the global development of the video. Then, the works of Hermann Nietzsche, who was a leading figure of Viennese actionism, and the works of the radical political artist Piotr Pavlensky. The audience will have the opportunity to become more familiar with the life and artistic work of Ulaj, one of the first creators of polaroid photos, but also of performances realized through collaboration with former partner Marina Abramović.

The exhibition will be available for visitors until December 30, 2022, at several locations: The Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, the Art Salon of the Cultural Center of Novi Sad, and the Creative district – BUREAU. The curator of the exhibition is Dr. Sanja Kojić Mladenov.

The open form of the exhibition implies the integration of various media, procedural and interdisciplinary research, performance and collective action, interventions in real life and digital space, discussions, and exchanges, with utopian and socially critical attitudes.

The exhibition presents examples of unstable and emancipatory artistic practice, from the avant-garde to contemporary, media, and post-media arts. It refers to the results of the project as its starting point.

A permanent class of art, Center for new media_kuda.org aimed at mapping the social and artistic history of Novi Sad, and through the presentation of the network of protagonists and references, artistic, social, and political theories and practices that influenced the Novi Sad neo-avant-garde in the 1960s seventies of the XX century.

For this reason, the central part of the exhibition is occupied by the “Media Ontology” map, as a key segment of the Permanent Class of Art project, which presents the research methodology of the project and covers the field of historical avant-gardes from the beginning of the twentieth century, through the post-war neo-avant-garde, until contemporary artistic media productions. The exhibition continues to develop with a broader view of the local and international practices, by presenting other projects of a kind of artistic mapping scenes, such as the East Art Map of the Slovenian group IRWIN, social and interdisciplinary positioning visible in the social portraits of Uroš Đurić, radio podcast Femkanje Bojana Knežević and Katarina Petrović, with the psychogeographic mappings of the diSTRUKTURA group, and of network mappings present in the projects of Vladan Joler and Kate Crawford.

The Milky Way project was conceived as a public segment of the work of the Center for Intermediate and Digital art MSUV, focused on mapping, affirmation, and presentation of intermediate, interdisciplinary, and hybrid approaches to art, as well as the continuation of the introduction of new functions of the Museum in relation to different processes in contemporary culture. Professional collaborators on the project are Zoran Pantelić and Centar_kuda.org.

The participants of the exhibition are:

Katarina Allfa, Apsolutno, Arhiva MSUV – projekti u Kineskoj
četvrti / Kreativnom distriktu, Atelje DT20, Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, Ilia Belorukov, Danica
Bićanić, Centar za nove medije_kuda.org, Atilla Csernik, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Vuk Ćosić,
Tibor Bada (Bada Dada), Aleksandar Davić, diSTRUKTURA, Doplgenger, Čedomir Drča / Slobodan
Tišma, Uroš Đurić, IRWIN, Vladan Joler / Kate Crawford, Novi_Sad / Isaac Niemand, László
Kerekes, Bojana S. Knežević / Katarina Petrović, Katalin Ladik, Sanja Latinović, Mirko Lazović,
Hermann Nitsch, Novosadska gradska komuna / Božidar Mandić, Pyotr Pavlensky, Dan
Perjovschi, Zoran Popović, Bogdanka Poznanović, Darija S. Radaković, Marica Radojčić, Milica
Rakić, Vujica Rešin Tucić, Saša Stojanović, Bálint Szombathy, Judita Šalgo, Predrag Šiđanin,
Rastislav Škulec, TOKI Art Space, Ulay, Verbumprogram (Ratomir Kulić, Vladimir Mattioni), Bill
Viola, Dragan Vojvodić, Želimir Žilnik, Radionica – Akademija umetnosti Novi Sad / Novi likovni
mediji.

The sponsor of MSUV is the Provincial Secretariat for Culture, Public Information, and Religious Relations communities. The exhibition was supported by the “Novi Sad – European Capital of Culture 2022” Foundation and “The Other Europe”, a Delegation of the European Union to the Republic of Serbia and EU-Japan Fest from Tokyo.