The retrospective exhibition PUBLIC SECRETS, organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad, presents the work of the artist Zoran Naskovski encompassing a few decades. Naskovski is one of the most important representatives of the independent art scene of the 1990s and one of the most prominent Serbian artists, continually active for more than three decades in the field of contemporary art.

Following a succession of influential works such as Death in Dallas, L’Origine du monde, War Frames and others, which attracted attention internationally, and expert analyses of his work, this exhibition is the first retrospective of Naskovski’s artworks and artistic engagement in the context of social issues of current topical interest, institutional critique and activism, specific artistic explorations and methodologies, as well as innovations in the field of video art, installations, performance and media-related art practices. Through his works based on the transformation of media, Naskovski examines controversial social processes that imply political and economic oppression, media manipulation of images and information, as well as negation of the critical potential and ethical functions of public institutions. Proceeding from the importance of radical abstraction in the culture of resistance (White Cloud), from the early 1990s Naskovski’s art practice been marked by his engaged attitude towards current social issues, as well as the actual medium and language of art. It was then that complex spatial and audio-video installations The Voice of the Hand, No Knocking, as well as the first delegated performance on the Serbian art scene, Apollo 9, featuring the folk singer Mašinka Lukić, were realised. The Internet project War Frames, which uses the television programme broadcast during the NATO bombing campaign as a ready-made and shifts it to the realm of the Internet, was presented within the framework of the central exhibition of the 52nd Venice Biennale. His seminal work, the video installation Death in Dallas, exhibited at numerous international exhibitions, constitutes an example of radical editing characterised by complex and discoded relations of linguistic and audio-visual elements, as well as a forceful juxtaposition of image and sound. The long-term project Mandala and Cross represents an open platform for reviewing the policies of images in space between the visible and the invisible through the analysis of newly established relations in the world through the prism of establishing new borderlines between the European and non-European order and context. The installation Crisis / Ornette Coleman in Belgrade, which received the Politika Award, deals with the issue of racism and the new crisis of conservatism, and is based on research into documents, artefacts, projections, video recordings and raw material. The media ontology of his art practice, in historical terms, relates to the experimentality of the avant-garde and conceptual art whose media scope ranges from painting, video, film, installation, performance, photography, sound to digital art practices and artificial intelligence (the project Question).

Zoran Naskovski (1960) graduated at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Arts in Belgrade. His works were presented within the framework of the key exhibitions and art events in the 1990s, among them: the exhibition Murder at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 1997, the exhibition Focus Belgrad, held in 1998 (ifa Gallery, Berlin), the exhibition After the Wall. Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm in 1999/2000, and subsequently at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, in 2000, and also at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2000/2001, and within the framework of international exhibitions of some of the most significant museums and institutions: the Whitney Museum in New York, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, the Tate Museum in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Fridericianum Museum in Kassel, Kunsthale Vien in Viena, the MACRO Museum in Rome, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, etc. and in media festivals: Transmediale in Berlin, the Dutch Festival of Electronic Art – V2 in Rotterdam, Impact Festival in Utrecht, WRO Media Art Biennale in Wroclaw, the Dallas Video Festival in Dallas, the Instants Video Festival in Marseilles, etc. Naskovski participated in the central exhibition of the 52nd Venice Biennale, Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the present Tense, selected by the curator Robert Storr in 2007. He is the recipient of a number of significant awards, among them: The Nadežda Petrović Memorial in Čačak (1996), the annual exhibition of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Belgrade (1997), The 44th October Salon (2003), The 47th October Salon (2006) and the Politika Award for the best exhibition in 2020.

19/10/2023–3/03/2024

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Ušće 10, Belgrade

II, III and IV floor

Exhibition opening: Thursday 19/10 at 7pm

26/01/2024–17/03/2024

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Dunavska 37, Novi Sad

Exhibition curators:

Gordana Nikolić, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina and Una Popović, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade

Exhibition production:

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Novi Sad

Patrons:

The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia

The Provincial Secretariat for Culture, Public Information and Relations with the Religious Communities of Vojvodina

Sponsors: ЕPSON; Polydor

Support: SPACE MODERN; LajtNet; DVS – Division Visual Solutions;

Wiener Städtische Serbia