Our Still in Belgrade monthly guide is bound to take you to the best parties, festivals, events and the finest crowds in town. Let’s see what’s going on this October in Belgrade.

October Salon 2018: This year’s art directors and curators of the exhibition are Gunnar Kvaran and Danielle Kvaran who, through the concept of The Marvellous Cacophony, have gathered 72 artists from around the world. The concept of the 57thOctober Salon, according to the curatorial statement, is based on the fact that the Western perception of contemporary art has become universal and that “cacophony” has been the denominator of disparate art movements since the beginning of the 21st century. The name of the exhibition – The Marvelous Cacophony – is meant to suggest a constellation of works that express, through their forms, structures and content, the diversity and richness of the cacophonous expression as an important element or condition in contemporary art today. The curators want to present artistic production worldwide by looking into diverse art scenes, different generations. The exhibition structured in this way will therefore be “an installation as a mirror of the world”, as a diversified situation, rich in cacophony. The exhibition will be placed at five venues in the city centre – the Cultural Centre of Belgrade (Art Gallery, Artget Gallery, Podroom Gallery), Belgrade City Museum, Remont Gallery, U10 Art Space and the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In the media of video, sculpture, painting, performance, etc., the idea is to emphasize, through the cacophonous structure of the exhibition, the diversified artistic production that bridges the national, racial, generational, gender, class and other categories.

At this year’s Salon, an interesting selection of younger generation artists has been made, that includes Darja Balagić, Ivana Bašić, Vuk Ćuk, Aleksandra Domanović, Lidija Delić, Maja Đorđević, Nina Ivanović, Tijana Kojić, Radenko Milak, Jelena Mijić, Nemanja Nikolić and Branko Milisković. Most of the above-mentioned artists have already exhibited at some eminent institutions in the country and abroad. Although elusive, the scene of the artists of younger generation that often eludes radar, shows at the October Salon the diversity in approaching and reflecting on important issues in the field of visual arts.

The representatives of the artists of middle generation from Serbia and the region are Marija Ćalić, Jasmina Cibic, Ivan Grubanov, Marta Jovanović, David Maljković, Đorđe Ozbolt and Katarina Zdjelar. The common thread connecting the mentioned artists seems to be their participation in biennials, specifically the Venice Biennale, and their international visibility.

Ivan Grubanov’s work at the Salon refers to and continues his work United Dead Nations, presented at the Pavilion of the Republic of Serbia at the 56th Venice Biennale. The morphed flags and their visual trails present a connection with the historic trails that disappearing of nations leaves behind: scattered bodies, broken histories, dead nations/countries, temporary shelters and banners of deconstructed collectives soaked in pain and desire.

David Maljković, also a participant in the 56th Venice Biennale, displays his work that explores the malleability of the collective and individual experience of time and space. The artist presents the viewers with works that create their own space, time and history and, at the same time, suggests the answers to the uncertainty of the unfathomable future. Thus, he often plays with the possibilities provided by the media at hand, and makes works with a greater and more intuitive use of material.

Marta Jovanović participated in the 55th Venice Biennale in the series of talks “Venice Agendas” on the art of performance, along with some of the most important artists and curators in the field of performance, such as Joan Jonas and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Lately, her performances have become a cathartic weapon for her personal struggles with motherhood, interpersonal relationships and divorce. The transformation through which Marta Jovanović was forced to pass is reflected in several works created over the past years in which she embodies her personal problems in a sublimated way.

Katarina Zdjelar – artist, theoretician, professor, activist – lives and works in Rotterdam and Belgrade. Her latest work, the installation Not a Pillar, Not a Pile (Tanz Für Dore Hoyer), was nominated for the most prestigious Dutch Prix de Rome Award, which is considered an exceptional achievement in the world of art. Katarina Zdjelar represented Serbia at the 53rd Venice Biennale, where her video work The Perfect Sound (2009) attracted international attention. The work of Katarina Zdjelar AAA (Mein Herz), 2016, is a single-shot work showing a young woman simultaneously performing four compositions. While preserving the original style, tempo, and rhythm of the individual works, she maintains the key of the different music pieces. Silence, music, sound and words alternate and collide.

Jasmina Cibic is a well-known Slovenian artist who lives and works in London. She analyses specific national, political, cultural and artistic origins, creating a characteristic, her own specific language. She works in the media of film, installation, object and photography. After representing the Republic of Slovenia at the 55thBiennial of Contemporary Art in Venice with the project For Our Economy and Culture, she gained an international recognition. Jasmina Cibic’s works seem to be a multimedia story composed of film and performance – about the relationship among art, politics, architecture, where her starting point is often an actual architectural structure. Now, her work is included in the current exhibition on Yugoslav architecture (Toward a Concrete Utopia) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Đorđe Ozbolt is known for his bold mixing of historical-artistic models and bizarre humour. He studied architecture at the University of Belgrade and in 1991 moved to London, where he continued painting studies at the Royal Academy. Ozbolt is not well known in our country; he lives and works in London, from where in the recent years he has exhibited at Gallery Baton, Seoul, Korea (2017); Holburne Museum, Bath, England (2015); Hauser & Wirth, New York (2015); Herald St., London, England (2014) etc. Ozbolt has participated in a great number of group exhibitions, including Love: the First of 7 Virtues, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Hudson Valley, Peekskill, New York (2015); Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland, Visual Carlow, Carlow, Ireland (2014); The Allure of the Collection, National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2012); Figure Studies, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Prague Biennale, Prague, Check Republic (2007); The Grand Tour, Holburne Museum, Bath (2016) and Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, England (2017). In the spring of 2017, the Hauser & Wirth Publishing House published a comprehensive monograph on Ozbolt’s work with a text by Oliver Basciano.

Dušan Otašević and Vladimir Veličković are representatives of European and Serbian art since the second half of the 20th century and are among the most eminent local artists to be presented at the October Salon again, after several decades.

The October Salon will be held from September 15th to October 28th

ICELAND IN BELGRADE 
Exhibition: ICELAND IN BELGRADE
29. 10. 2018.
KC Grad 20h 

t’s our pleasure to invite you to the exhibition opening of ICELAND IN BELGRADE supported by Icelandair, the national aviation company of Iceland. The idea behind the exhibition is the need to showcase the inspirational culture and nature of Iceland, as well as to give an opportunity to the visitors to get acquainted with the offers and the conduct of business od Icelands’ aviation company. 

The multimedia content of this exhibition depicts the key segments of several sites, among which there are already well-known in the tourism world. Through photos and video, artist Katarina Simović points to various parts of the island landscape and how the combination of natural preconditions enabled the formation of various forms of relief and a large number of natural phenomena that make this remote and isolated island an irresistible tourist attraction.

About artist:

Katarina Simović has studied Serbian literature and language at University of Belgrade. She is engaged in photography for the last five years, and her first solo exhibition in Belgrade was in 2017 under the title “Art of raw”.

Through her work, Katarina deals with the existential issue of women in the 21st century, but also explores different areas of photography and video. You can see her works on:
https://www.stocksy.com/katarinasimovic

If you wish to watch some good movies we suggest visiting Cinema Zvezda. Programme is available on FB page.

Retrospective exhibition of Ilija Šoškić at MoCAB

Action Forms

From 12th October to 24th December 2018

Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Dunavska 37, Novi Sad
Opening on Friday, 12th October 2018 at 7pm

Museum of Contemporary Art, Ušće 10, Beograd
Opening on Saturday, 13th October 2018 at 1pm

Exhibition curators: dr Zoran Erić, MoCAB and Nebojša Milenković, MoCAV

The exhibition Action Forms is the first retrospective of Ilija Šoškić to be held in the entire post-Yugoslav cultural space. Also, it is the first exhibition to be jointly organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade and the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, and is to run in Belgrade and Novi Sad at the same time. The curators Zoran Erić and Nebojša Milenković conceived and adapted the idea for the exhibition to the particular spaces of both museums.

In the Novi Sad segment of the exhibition the focus is put on works involving the body, Šoškić’s ideologically loaded actions in the public sphere. It deals with the early performances, actions and tableau vivants which the artist carried out in the first half of the seventies in Italy, but also during his frequent appearances at the Students’ Cultural Centre in Belgrade. Particularly accentuated are the activities which ultimately lead to the embodiment of the well-known avantgarde principle by which the artist himself becomes his own artwork. This stage culminates in the most radical and certainly most famous of Šoškić’s works Maximum Energy – Minimum Time (1975), in the performative gesture involving the firing of a revolver into the wall of the gallery L’Attico, which represented at that time the global epicentre of the avantgarde. The antithesis to this act is the artist’s many-year withdrawal from art and utter commitment to motorcyclism, which also embodies one of the key philosophical principles of Šoškić’s art and life: the principle of uninterrupted movement and nomadism.

In the Belgrade part of the exhibition emphasis is put on the conceptual series SATORTraphosParallels, as well as the individual works of elementary but also complex geometric forms. These works are the product of Šoškić’s interest in mathematical axioms and problems, as well as the philosophical postulates to whose research he dedicated himself during the eighties. Moving between mathematics, philosophy and mythology, Šoškić contemplates in a specific way man’s relation to nature, which also becomes a thread running through a series of works (Mourning and Drought, Zygote, Square Circle, etc.). Holding back from art as “a great narrative”, Šoškić finds in this creative period “small niches” in which to formulate different artistic positions, so that the experience gained from the tableau vivants and the performances starts to be inscribed spatially and in ambient in the installations which remain as artefacts after the artistic actions. The conceptual layout of these works adheres to the process of artistic deliberation ─ starting from sketches, points of embarkation for works with textual artistic expositions, through photo documentation of actions and performances all the way to the realised objects and installations themselves.

Through a dialogue between the two segments constituting the exhibition which itself isn’t chronologically ordered but rather follows the conceptual lines in the development of the artist’s work, the syntagm for the name of the exhibition Action Forms is extracted. The origin of this is Mario Diacono’s term “forms in action” from which is derived the polysemic formulation which at one possible plane of reading joins the two key words denoting the exhibition segments, in Novi Sad action, and in Belgrade form.

Ilija Šoškić is a unique creative figure and is personally characterised by numerous identities: athlete, artist, performer, “sixty-eighter”, radical left-winger, theoretician and motorbiker. Belonging and being active in different cultural spheres at the same time (European, Italian, Yugoslav, Montenegrin, Croatian, Serbian), Šoškić succeeded in staying true to the ideas with which he embarked on his career – a radical (neo)avantgardist, a guerrilla artist, but also a metaphysicist who, even though he didn’t manage to change society, through his work and engagement moved the borders of the perception of art not only as a space of political struggle, but also of the philosophical contemplation of meaning as a precondition for social and artistic survival.

Šoškić is a member of the first generation of Yugoslav artists who worked in the spirit of the new artistic practices. Before entering art, he was an athlete and was the state champion and representative of SFRY in the hammer throw. He attended the art school in Herceg Novi, the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and the Art Academy in Bologna (Accademia di belle arti). From 1969 until 1972, he lived in Bologna and from 1972 in Rome. He gained world attention through his cooperation with the legendary Gallery L’Attico in Rome where he exhibited together with Jannis Kounellis, Luigi Ontani, Michelangelo Pistoletto and others. Famous critics such as Emilio Villa, Achille Bonito Oliva, Mario Diacono have written about him. He exhibited at the most important international and Yugoslav art manifestations (Venice Biennial, Trigon, the Yugoslav Documents, April Meetings, etc.) He has lectured at the most eminent European art academies (Düsseldorf, Rome, etc.). Ilija Šoškić’s artistic practice spans more than five decades and his work encompasses performance, tableau vivant, the art of behaviour, guerrilla art, cultural and political mythology, mathematics and the metaphysics of nature.

Elena Colombi (NTS, London) | Putnik at Drugstore

October 27 from midnight 

Putnik is a fresh party series that started this summer and now it’s having a very special number three. We’re snatching one of our favorite DJs at the moment, Italian-born and London-based Elena Colombi, to be our headliner at her very peak. The word on the interwebz is that Chambers are coming back in style with special guest of the night, Red Light Radio’s Roelien.

LINEUP
Elena Colombi (NTS, London)
Roelien (Red Light Radio, Amsterdam)
33.10.3402
Bagheera

Elena Colombi was voted one of the top five acts at Dekmantel festival a couple of months ago. Her shows on NTS radio, as well as all of the guest mixes she did, are packed with great sounds the fainthearted might label as dark. Ten years ago, after moving to London, Elena established her successful party night and started building a career that truly exploded a year or two ago. This will be her second time in Belgrade and first time at Drugstore.

Equally precise about what she plays, here comes Roelien, Red Light Radio’s not-so-secret weapon. Roelien will be maintaining the fire in the Chambers and representing Amsterdam Now.

FB event.