Exhibition history

Siniša Ilić: The Air Before the Encounter / Triggers

10.07.2025. - 31.08.2025. / MSU

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.

The Possibilities for '25 - Leonardo Losciale: Sisto Re

03.07.2025. - 31.08.2025. / MSU, Black Box

Possibilities for '25 is a long-term collaborative project connecting the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Zagreb, initiated by MSU curator Leila Topić. The project continues the curatorial vision of former museum director Davor Matičević, the founder of the famous Possibilities for '71, which in the early 1970s promoted then-young artists such as Sanja Iveković, Dalibor Martinis, Boris Bućan and Jagoda Kaloper. Possibilities for '25 presents recent projects by students and recent alumni of the Academy, who continue to explore art through experimental, critical and process-based approaches rooted in current social and technological contexts.

Kinematografije otpora present: And then i found some meteorites in my room – a project by Driant Zeneli

20.05.2025. - 25.06.2025. / MSU, Black Box

Can a theory of dark matter born on the margins of society destabilize scientific narratives and open a space for utopia? Can a DJ set and the improvised cosmic philosophy of a worker offer new forms of collectivity and imagination?

As part of this year's Subversive Festival, whose theme is The Age of Conflict, the Museum of Contemporary Art presents the exhibition by internationally recognised Albanian artist Driant Zeneli, whose work resides at the intersection of science, fairytale and resistance. The exhibition is realised as part of a long-standing collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Subversive Festival, and is curated by Leila Topić (MSU) and Dina Pokrajac, Artistic Director of the Subversive Festival.

Exhibition as part of The Arts of Resistance (TAoR) Project

08.05.2025. - 21.06.2025. / MSU, 2. kat

The Museum of Contemporary Art announces the exhibition The Arts of Resistance (TAoR) as part of the international project of the same name. The exhibition will open on May 8 and run until June 21, 2025, presenting the results of months of research and co-creative processes exploring the connections between historical, cultural, social, political, and physical ecologies of resistance against fascism.

The Arts of Resistance project, initiated by artists Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond from the HASENHERZ association, brings together young artists, researchers, and experts to explore historical contexts of resistance through a co-creative approach and reinterpret them through contemporary art. Drawing from Umberto Eco’s text We Are European (2019), the project examines Europe as an experiment in peace, identity, and resistance against fascism—both in the past and today.

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.

Motovun Encouters

20.03.2025. - 04.05.2025. / MSU, Black Box

The Motovun Encounters, organized as international meetings of visual artists, were theme-based events held from 1972 to 1984 in Motovun, Istria. Eleven meetings of artists of different poetics, generations and backgrounds took place throughout this period. The meetings were organized by the Galleria del Cavallino from Venice, Ethnographic Museum from Pazin, and, joining the endeavor in 1976, the City Gallery of Contemporary Art (today MSU).

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.