Exhibition history

The Sun Is Burnt / The Archive of Cetinje Biennials

20.03.2025. - 29.04.2025. / MSU, 2. kat

** The exhibition opening is at 7 p.m.

The exhibition The Sun Is Burnt / The Archive of Cetinje Biennials is an overview of the legacy left by the event that took place between 1991 and 2004 in Cetinje, Montenegro.

The international event, which brought together around 700 artists, curators and cultural workers throughout its 14-year duration, was left unelaborated and without a systematic history of its activity following its last edition in 2004. Even though a renewal has often been alluded to, the Biennial was gradually erased from social memory and remained inaccessible to new generations of artists.

Jan St. Werner: Vibraception – Investigations in Wavespace

11.03.2025. - 19.04.2025. / MSU, 1. i 2. kat povremenih izložbi

The Museum of Contemporary Art presents a solo exhibition by Jan St. Werner, a researcher, sound artist, and composer of electronic music, titled Vibraception – Investigations in Wavespace. The exhibition transforms the museum space into a sound environment, using sound as a tool to activate both space and architecture. Precisely directed sound waves shape the environment, creating dynamic soundscapes that change depending on the movement of the visitors. Within the interior of the Museum, panels are installed that, by directing sound waves, create unpredictable resonances and changes in the perception of the building’s architecture, building upon the interactive sound panels of the author’s Excitatory Yards work displayed on the MSU plateau in September 2024.

Nina Kurtela :

23.01.2025. - 09.03.2025. / MSU, Black Box

Entering Jagoda Kaloper’s former studio inspired Nina Kurtela to embark on multi-related and concomitant activities. One of the approaches to the symbolically inherited ‘room of her own’ is her project under the title Jagoda: Spaces of the Invisible, on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the Triggers cycle.

The Smell of Freshly Chopped Wood

19.12.2024. - 23.02.2025. / MSU, 2. kat povremenih izložbi

The exhibition The Smell of Freshly Chopped Wood tells about our life, work and belonging to specific landscapes, forests, islands, plateaus and valleys of Balkans and Mediterranean region, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Italy, which at first sight look like idyllic nature. In fact, they are "living archives" whose "documents" are trees marked for felling, artificial lakes, objects left behind by refugees or the memories of the people who live there, their traditions, knowledge and experiences. We experience nature only through our presence and our activities: nature is wood for cutting, water for hydroelectric power plants, wind for windmills, animals for hunting, plants and fruits for our food, or the routes of our transport routes.

SintArt 17 - Driant Zeneli: The Valley of Uncanny Lovers

03.12.2024. - 29.03.2025. / Zbirka Richter

The project Driant Zeneli has created for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb centres around a wondrous and touching film about uncanny lovers, made in the midst of the lithium mining crisis and fight for environmental and ecological justice in the Western Balkans. The central protagonist of the narrative is a small leaf embodying the fragility and vulnerability of the modern man. Driant Zeneli uses the image of the love-obsessed leaf as a metaphor of complete openness and vulnerability, but also as, paradoxically, a daring hero who uncompromisingly follows his vision regardless of the loss of illusions during his mission.

Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working – Aspects of Dance as Cultural, Political, and Art Work in Yugoslavia and After

20.11.2024. - 23.02.2025. / MSU, 1. kat povremenih izložbi

This exhibition represents long-term research on the development of a digital archive of contemporary dance and performing arts of the post-Yugoslavian region. As that is an ongoing process, we do not think of this manifestation as a final act or actualization of the material, but as a step towards sharing the relations we are building with the materials. We are showing it as a(n) (un)working material, as a research space that is in its potentiality, not being there yet, or finished.

Divided Time: Cries and Whispers / The Imitation of Life Studio 1987–1991

07.11.2024. - 12.01.2025. / MSU, Black Box

Thirty-three years following the end of their collaboration, the artistic duo Darko Fritz and Željko Serdarević present themselves with the exhibition Divided Time at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, which brings together their joint artistic production consisting of fine artworks, the documentation of installations in public space, and music and stage performances.

Jelena Janković: 8th Floor

24.10.2024. - 20.11.2024. / Zbirka Richter

The exhibition 8^th Floor combines the architectural heritage of Zagrebian skyscrapers in the district of Vrbik, popularly known as Rockets, and the introspective insight and visual poetics of photographer Jelena Janković. Vrbik Residential Towers, built in 1968 according to the project of the architectural bureau Centar 51, symbolise the urban development of Zagreb and combine brutalist aesthetics with functional modernist architecture. Even though this heritage is recognised by the wider public today as an influential creation of architect Vjenceslav Richter – hence the moniker Richter’s Skyscrapers – his collaborators on this project were also Berislav Šerbetić, Ljubo Iveta, and Olga Koržinek. 

MARKO TADIĆ : THE KITCHEN

12.09.2024. - 24.11.2024. / MSU, 2. kat

Marko Tadić’s exhibition, as part of the Kožarić Studio - Reviving Lab Cycle, is also part of the Triggers Cycle, in which artists, activists, communities or associations, each in their own way, interpret museum collections. 

The links between Marko Tadić and Ivan Kožarić are profound. Tadić, just like Kožarić, perceives his own work as a large abstract archive that speaks of itself mainly through the whole. Furthermore, he also underlines other components of Kožarić’s approach that meant a lot to him as an artist, namely, the overlapping of living and exhibition spaces, and treating the entire spectrum of material objects as art tools. Still, the deepest connection between them as artists is the constant urge to explore the world around them through play.  

Jonas Staal: PROPAGANDA STATION

05.09.2024. - 20.10.2024. / MSU, Black Box

Propaganda is often presented as a relic from the totalitarian past. Only in the case of contemporary dictatorships, such as those of Putin or Kim Jong-un, is the term still used. But as the project Propaganda Station by artist and propaganda researcher Jonas Staal shows, democracy is not free from propaganda either.