Serbia Reconsidered

Marko Stojanovic - Any City (2015)

“The new Serbia – notes Luciano Benetton, the creator of Imago Mundi - appears as restless as it is interesting, suspended between the horizons of multi-ethnic coexistence and a national culture that is apt to become the ideology of the nation; between turning back and longing for the future; between EU membership and a magnetic attraction towards Russia.” In this context – adds Benetton – “the Serbian contemporary art world appears to be experien¬cing a time of unrest. A new approach can be envisioned through the ideas of young people, the first generations to understand the long waves of change, and through those who believe beauty and culture are important pillars to support the healing of the fractures left by the Balkan tragedy, and to nourish cohesion and identity. The collection seems an ideal way to present to the world the vision of artists who have spent a great part of their lives in an atmosphere of crisis and conflict. With an impressive diversity of techniques (painting, photography, collage, sculpture, embroidery and stitching on canvas) the Serbian artists offer their reflection, sometimes ironic, in other cases painful, on the restless present of Serbia and on the future that is to come.”

Vladimir Peric - Stagbeetle, From The Series Digital Mutants (2015)



“The works in this collection – clarifies the curator Saša Janjić - show the heteroge¬neity of the Serbian art scene. There are artists of different generations, with different art poetics and political positions gathered in one place. Also, a variety of artistic media are represented, starting with classical painting, both figurative and abstract, drawing, photography, objects and textual interventions. The most diverse materials and techniques have been used, as well as innovative combinations of different elements. The collection reveals an amazing richness and diversity of artistic production at a time when the general impression is that nothing or almost nothing is happening in Serbia within the sphere of contemporary art. The specified format has in many ways influenced the thematic content, as well as the formal, technical and stylistic shaping of the works.”

Mrđan Bajic - Untitled (2015)



“The collection – adds Katarna Mitrović, also a curator – consists of artists of both the older generations and of the post-Yugoslav generations, those who already have behind them considerable international experience, as well as those who act solely in their own local environment. Fragmented and seemingly unrela¬ted, this whole suggests a possibility of ’reading’ current Serbian art: the refusal to disappear and become completely marginalized, the return of individualism and self-reflection, but also an attempt to enter into a dialogue with the ’other’ and the different, with the contemporary and the past, and, above all, with a clear but not always optimistic vision of the future.”

Lana Vasiljevic - Serbia (2015)

Claudio Scorretti intervenes to highlight, among other things, how Serbia and the other former Yugoslavian countries, thanks to the diversity of Tito’s regime, were the only ones in the neighboring socialist zone, “to enjoy a real synchronicity with Western art, though obviously within the limits imposed by the regime and featuring the local peculiarities and inherent political constraints. At that time, Yugoslavia made moderni¬sm the keynote of its official cultural policy, and therefore supported contemporary art and in particular abstract art.”

Spartak Dulic - Xx-9f (2015)

But the break up of Yugoslavia was followed by the period of violent fragmentation that forced some of the positive elements of the past into the shadows. Today, Serbian artists, witnesses to a too recent past, “are beginning to define themselves – observes Scorretti - in the supra-national and global context, reconnecting with great lack of inhibition but also with irony and humour, the ties temporarily suspended for almost a decade in the ‘90s.” And it is in this context – comments Luciano Benetton – that “ the collection offers identity issues that are no longer casus belli, but which remain questions of principle in the transition from the ’ex’ world to the global world. Universal affinities and tragedies of misunderstanding, frosts and thaws. Memory and rejection of memory. Screams of the soul and voices of hope.”