As a part of the Triggers series of the permanent exhibition framework The Collection as a Verb, The Air Before the Encounter by Siniša Ilić transforms the gallery space of the Museum of Contemporary Art into a collaged environment—an assemblage of diverse materials, representational fragments, and performative imprints of the body. Works from the museum’s collection are both the starting point and the incentive for the display of Ilić’s drawings, collages, objects, and spatial interventions. Works created in different spaces and in different periods of the 20^th century are in spatial dialogue with Ilić's interventions that allude to the androgyny, our possible interventions on the surface or representation of the body, pleasure and contact on the edges of explicitness and abstraction. Installed within the labyrinthine architecture of MSU, the exhibition is placed in a constrained physical space in order to communicate with the free interpretation of corporality, simultaneously alluding that its tabooed, exploited, concealed, vulnerable, and fragmentary, interwoven and composed of heterogenous materials. Ilić’s works unfold through ephemeral spatial interventions: tape, pigment, charcoal marks, scissors’ cuts, erotic drawings, soft-sculptural forms made from textiles and sponge.

Thus, Boris Gruenwald's print portfolio, created in the USA in the early 1970s, after the wave of civil rights movements for women's, racial and sexual rights, and later the abolitionist movement – ​​explicitly and at the same time cautiously and tenderly depicts interpersonal and inter-corporeal relations in erotic encounters and fantasies. The prints in which Gruenwald collages photographs of an abandoned prison and the raw drawings that may have been found there, done with almost academic skill in execution and composition, convey corporeality and its presence, desires and urges in regimes of control, surveillance and punishment. There could be some possible autobiographical experience in the background, or at least deep compassion for the marginalized and the rejected. In the text The Cathedral of the Lost by Boris Gruenwald published in the third issue of the magazine Spot, Radoslav Putar concludes, rejecting contemptuous comments about pornographic drawings of questionable literacy, “that the writings and drawings on the walls of a county jail in some place in the United States are extremely aesthetically valuable...beautiful”.

The elegant bodies in the drawings of Farkas Molnár, an artist formed in the context of the Bauhaus, evoke modernist Arcadia or an age of innocence. Molnar's composition of free, utopian youth in an undefined landscape is an introduction to Ilić's drawings and collages with androgynous youthful figures. These works indirectly convey the spirit of youth in wartime and the transitional nineties with their material features, as well as their performance and setting. The androgynous figures in the assemblage attributed to Dragica Metilović in an unconventional setting are exposed to meticulous forensic examination rather than to the experience of the audience, reducing the idea of ​​the work of art to its material presence and fragility.

The painting Dual – two irreal figures by Stjepan Lahovsky from 1930, along with objects in space, is a surrealist composition that suggests physical contact and sensations. Lahovsky was considered as one of the most talented students of his generation at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts in the 1920s, but he refused to exhibit during his lifetime, while his oeuvre was preserved thanks to the great commitment of collector Josip Kovačić. He received real affirmation and a contemporary reading in the exhibition Green Ribbons: Self-representational Works by Nastja Rojc and Stjepan Lahovsky from the Collection of Dr. Josip Kovačić, authored by Leonida Kovač. In an interview with Josip Kovačić from 1977, Lahovsky humorously recalls, looking back on this particular painting: "My Slovenian friend Vlado Čurda once sang in Senj: 'There were two sitting on a stool.' That is what inspired me. I think they are not really abstract, but stylized paintings. The head is a hemisphere and it’s all more surreal than abstract… They are figures alluding to a theme. I started with the realistic and transformed two figures into two cylinders on two pillows."

Pillows will thus become sponges in Ilić's spatial extension, with some just-indicated possible presence, trace or imprint of corporeality, and the stylizations of organs, limbs and various forms of touching and interweaving are distinguished by figurative puzzles of collages and cuttings. These seemingly abstract body arabesques, along with spatial interventions with color and reinforced black tape, gather the space of the Triggers framework into an organic whole. In it, through regimes of warning, restrictions on movement, surveillance and gaze, emphasized with different intensity, corporeality manifests itself in its vulnerability and exposed nature – material, perceptive and speculative.

Jasna Jakšić

Siniša Ilić (1977, Belgrade) is a visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice starts from drawing, which he combines with video, scenography and installation. Reflecting on social tensions, cultural heritage, forms of work and ways of nurturing friendship and solidarity, Ilić creates choreographical installations in which performance, documentary, poetic and affective interweave through the processes of reshaping and establishing new connections. His practice includes research into forms of collective work and he is among the co-founders of TkH (Walking Theory) art and theory platform from Belgrade (2000-2017). Selection of exhibitions: In the Garden of Bodies, Instruments and Afternoon Sun, MOCA, Podgorica, 2025; Behind the Tide, MOMCA Rijeka, 2025; Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales, Art Encounters, Timisoara, 2025; Cut-Line-Print, MOCA, Belgrade; No Feeling is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection, Kunsthalle Vienna, 2023; Pressure points (with T. Gverović), Collection of Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter, MOCA Zagreb, 2022; Public and space, CZKD, Belgrade; Bigger Than Myself, MAXXI, Rome, 2021; Southern Constellations, MG+MSUM, Ljubljana 2019

Curated by Jasna Jakšić

Exhibition design: Siniša Ilić and Jasna Jakšić

Technical support: Ivan Tudek, Mirjana Grab, Aleksandar Milošević, Renato Mihaljenović Conservation and restauration: Mirta Pavić, Tomica Paradi, Leda Grabičanin

Executive editor: Jadranka Pintarić

Translation: Sara Maletić

Design: Martin Peranović

Supported by the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia

Siniša Ilić
The Air Before the Encounter
MSU, Triggers
10 / 7 – 31 / 8 / 2025

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