Inside Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Inside Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

November 2020.

It was a chilly morning as Sladja and I made our way through the Park of Friendship toward Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Neither of us can pretend to have much expertise when it comes to contemporary art. Rather, the museum was right on the doorstep of our rented apartment, little more than a 10-minute walk. So a visit here felt like the missing piece of the jigsaw in our explorations of the neighbourhood’s local parks.

Thus we had ventured out to see what visual delights lay within. I certainly came armed with a bucketload of curiosity. After all, if I thought I knew very little about contemporary art in general, I would say that my knowledge of Serbian contemporary art was hovering around the zero mark.

As a national collection the museum’s works date back to 1958. However, it wasn’t until 1965 that everything moved into the award-winning modernist structure we see today.

Purpose built by the Serbian architects Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović, it lies just metres away from the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. In fact, there are some fine river views on offer from its upper floors.

Inside Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Before entering that day we paused outside the main entrance to check out a welcome installation called 10 Commandments For The 21st Century.

Created by the Finnish artist Tea Mäkipää, it’s hard to argue with her (admittedly preachy) overview of what’s wrong with the world and how we can better contribute to our time on Earth. Still, how many of these are we actually able to consistently follow? 

Inside we were pleasantly surprised to find that entry was free. Moment later, we were strolling into the main hall on the ground floor. It’s a cavernous space with tall, dramatic floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Apparently the interior underwent a massive ten-year renovation project between 2007 and 2017. They did a good job.

Immediately, we found our attention drifting towards an installation of hooded spectres running along the back wall. Which somehow reminded me of the death eaters in Harry Potter. But in actual fact they are representations of the iconic Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

12 x Solzhenitsyn, an art installation by Dordije Crncevic.

A Serbian sculptor by the name of Đorđije Crnčević created the piece. Unfortunately though he never got round to finishing them, so we’ll never quite know what effect he was going for with his aluminium creations. This is real life Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pictured below. I reckon he could have played a death eater. Or Dumbledore. 

Next we took in this dizzying, maze-like photo montage called A Black and White Eye (1995). Its creator, Era Milivojevic, took the shots in the 1990s on an old analogue Canon camera.

The work is, in the artist’s own words, “a statement of memory, accumulation, selection and visualisation”. According to Milivojevic, it should initially be viewed from a distance as an incomprehensible labyrinth.

Then the viewer should come gradually closer, allowing individual images to come into view. Milivojevic, who passed away in 2021 aged 77, exhibited his photographs, videos and performance art all over the world.

A further collection of pictures celebrates the life’s work of the Croatian-born Serbian photographer Tomislav Peternek. Credited as one of the first Balkan photographers to bring genuine artistic value to photojournalism, he captured defining political and social events across Yugoslavia throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

Inside Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Peternek often displayed these dramatic captures alongside moments of everyday life featuring ordinary people. Indeed this was evident in the collection we saw that day.

A crowd of students protest in Belgrade in 1968. An abandoned wedding dress hangs in the street in Kosovo (1992). Pictured below, a trio of devastated women in the aftermath of the 1979 Earthquake in Montenegro. Unlike many of the artists whose work we saw that day, Peternek is still alive today at the age of 90.

Next came an astounding installation that has stayed with me over the years. Powerful, chilling and surreal, Death in Dallas marries video footage from the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination with a traditional Serbian folk song dirge.

Created by the video artist Zoran Naskovski, we see images of JFK’s private life and office work. Then of course flashes from the fateful drive through Dallas, including some graphic rarely seen moments from the shooting itself.

Death in Dallas.

All the while the song Death in Dallas (Smrt u Dalasu) by Joze Karamatić plays out. At 17 minutes long, it is an uncompromisingly grim monologue that details the events of the assassination. Taken as a single piece of music, it is an exceptionally tough listen. But somehow, married up with the video footage, we both found the effect utterly hypnotising.

After Death in Dallas we definitely felt in need of something altogether lighter in tone. Luckily we found just that on the first floor with paintings from Serbia’s Modernism era, which roughly ran from 1880 to 1950.

Regardless of how into art we all  are, most of us have heard of and could probably recognise the works of Picasso, Monet, Matisse and Munch. But who were Serbia’s big players? I had absolutely no idea, which made pretty much everything here a revelation.

Let’s start with Jovan Bijelić. Born in Bosnia in 1884, Bijelić graduated from the Academy of Arts in Krakow. He then studied under the great Giorgio de Chirico in Paris before exhibiting his work across Europe in Zagreb, Berlin and Prague.

Jovan Bijelić (1884-1964).

There were several of his paintings in the museum that day. Pictured below is his Portrait of the Writer Milan Dedinac, done in 1926. Dedinac is one of Serbia’s most revered surrealist poets and was a fearsome theatre critic. I love how he is captured, with an unapologetically cocky sneer and arched, Bond villain eyebrows.

Elsewhere, I quite liked Portrait of Ljubomir Ivanović (1930). Ivanović was one of Serbia’s first impressionist painters who later became professor of graphic and printmaking at Belgrade’s Academy of Fine Arts during World War II. The artist who painted the artist was Branko Popović, a famed painter, art critic and architect.

Mića Popović meanwhile (it’s a very popular surname in Serbia) was a painter and experimental filmmaker. He was one of the key directors of the Yugoslav Black Wave movement, known for its dark humour and casting a critical eye over socialist Yugoslav society.

In the museum his infinitely more traditional Critique in the Landscape (1949) shows a trio of artist friends giving their opinions on Popović’s work. That’s Popović standing next to the piece in question. 

Inside Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art. 

In terms of his artistry, I much preferred Popovic’s fantastic Simina Street 9A. This small hexagonal spatial composition, created in 1971, depicts the artist and his liberal, non-conformist friends. After the end of the Second World War they began to assemble on Simina Street to share their writings and anti-Tito views.

The work shows, among others, Dobrica Ćosić (future Serbian president), Lazar Trifunović (historian and art critic) and Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz (writer and literary critic).

They appear on the street under umbrellas because of the need for discretion due to the political pressures they would have been under at the time. It’s an undeniably atmospheric piece, especially when you hear hushed voices representing those gathered as you enter the room.

On the 2nd floor we stopped to admire the work of a contemporary Serbian artist, Daniela Fulgosi. According to an online article we read, much of her work explores “portraits as a metaphor for the psychological study of character and interpersonal relationships”.

White Man by Daniela Fulogsi (1997).

While a simpleton like me isn’t exactly sure what that means, there is something arresting about White Man and Man in Japan. Probably in the scratchy way they have been crafted using a linocut printmaking technique.

On the 3rd floor we came across another installation by Zoran Naskovski, the dude that did Death in Dallas. This one is called War Frames and is a collection of frozen images taken from TV news reports covering the various wars, conflicts and political upheavals across Yugoslavia and Serbia in recent history.

Some of the frames are unflinchingly depressing. As you would expect there are chaotic scenes of bombed out buildings and people running from burning cars.

But one frame that particularly piqued my curiosity was a shot of the CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour. A well-known face on TV and on the ground throughout The Bosnian War, Amanpour was and remains a controversial figure for many Serbs.

In fact, they accused her of unobjective and manipulative reporting. In contrast, she was hailed in the west for her fearless approach, as seen when she confronted General Ratko Mladić, the so-called Butcher of Bosnia who was later convicted of war crimes at The Hague. 

Inside Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Another frame shows the Serbian singer Ceca, a hugely popular entertainer affectionately dubbed “The Mother of Serbia”. Her heartfelt brand of pop folk dominated the 1990s, making her one of the faces of Serbian patriotism as The Bosnian War played out.

Check out the little airplane icon in the bottom left corner of the picture below. The caption next to it says “air danger”, which means her performance was unfolding during a NATO bombing of Belgrade.

Sadly Ceca’s life has been riddled with controversy and tragedy. For many she will always be remembered for her marriage to Željko Ražnatović, the infamous paramilitary leader, mobster and eventually war criminal.

Until, that is, he was assassinated in 2000 by a corrupt off-duty police officer. Later, in 2011, she was convicted of embezzlement and possession of illegal firearms, serving a one year house arrest. 

Up on the 4th floor a few pieces stood out. First, let me draw your attention to a quirky painting with an equally amusing title. It’s called Miki, Natalija and Milica Before Miki Started Drinking.

It was created in 1989 by the rock star and painter Zoran Marinković. With no accompanying notes of any kind we are left to draw our own conclusions of precisely what went wrong for this (presumably) young working class Serbian family.

Miki, Natalija and Milica Before Miki Started Drinking.

And then there’s the photograph Flea Market Belgrade, taken by Milan Aleksić. The shot shows, in no uncertain terms, the harsh reality of everyday life for thousands of Serbian citizens in the mid 1990s. The image captures a moment at Buvljak, an open air market space where traders sold all manner of goods from blankets and sheets laid out directly on the dirt.

In an almighty (and one could argue distasteful) change of tone, we subsequently found ourselves entering the museum’s special exhibition. Titled Love Is Love, Wedding Bliss for All à la Jean Paul Gaultier, this was the first international fashion exhibition in Serbia.

Basically, this is a collection of 38 haute couture and prêt-à-porter wedding outfits created by Jean Paul Gaultier. The pieces are, in the fashion icon’s own words, “a great celebration of marriage, bringing together every type of union: straight, gay, transgender, cross-cultural and interracial, to rejoice in love in all its diversity”.

Inside Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Getting married soon? How about this La Mariee gown from Gaultier’s Gypsy Indians collection? It is comprised of vintage pieces of embroidery on cotton and silk scattered with silver and multicoloured sequins. Handmade, the blurb says it took over 210 hours to complete.

And yes…. don’t worry…. it comes fitted with a backpack for any baby you might need to haul around as you make your way down the aisle. A bizarre end to a thoroughly absorbing museum.

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