picks May 29, 2020

:mentalKLINIK

In January, Viktor Kiš, a sculptor and festival organizer with little museum experience, was installed by the Serbian prime minister as acting director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (MoCAB). Although it might not allay local professionals’ concerns about favoritism and expertise, the first project under the new directorship—the ephemeral takeover of one of the museum’s spaces by the Turkish collective :mentalKLINIK—nonetheless serves as a choice metaphor for the hollowing out of public institutions laid bare by the Covid-19 crisis.

The site of this installation is likewise fraught.

picks January 31, 2020

Oliver Ressler

Images of protest play on the walls of the dark basement of the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, in one of Europe’s most polluted cities. Comprising Vienna-based artist Oliver Ressler’s five-channel video installation Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart, 2016–19, they amount to more than a reminder of the obvious perils of carbon dependency and climate change. Rather, they represent the struggle of multitudes, gasping for breath against the necropolitics of extraction.

In Ressler’s five films, activists throughout Europe occupy sites of drilling and excavation (a coalfield

picks September 27, 2019

Anna-Sophie Berger

At the center of “Time”—Anna-Sophie Berger’s first solo show in Belgrade—is Shed (all works 2019), a modest wood-framed shelter clad in transparent plastic. Its door is closed but not locked; in the air floats a tacit understanding that viewers will not enter. Inside the structure, inspired by the provisional architecture the artist observed during a residency on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island last year, sit stacked boxes of candies labeled with the exhibition’s title. These contemplatively named treats are available in various flavors in Belgrade; those on view here are strawberry, and their presence

Maja Ćirić