Future of Melancholia

Cooperation: Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade

22.3.–8.6.2025

The exhibition Future of Melancholia explores the role that art can play in furthering our understanding of the future. It is evident that we are living in complex times that can bolster elegiac and melancholic sentiment. Melancholy stands for the mood of our time, both globally and regionally. It also enables us to think about inner and outer circumstances, deepening our understanding for our relationship to our psychological, social, and natural environments, and also looking at ​“other” possible worlds.

When we consider the shared experiences of such different countries as Serbia and Austria, which have been connected by a long history of both pleasures and sorrows, then we think again and again of such contradictory set of ideas as the preservation, restoration and prolongation of the status quo contrasted with a nonetheless existent faith in progress and a better future that also entails an element of the utopian. This leads to a diffuse mood of melancholy and nostalgia for tradition, also oriented toward a form of heroic dreaming, as if by way of a response to the experiences and images of the course of history and their still tangible effects on the present day.

This view of what has become a confusing state of affairs under the sign of a lack of self-confidence and simultaneous self-affirmation against the other stands, however, not just for a regional specificity but rather reflects a global picture of our age. It shows not only the complexity and an erstwhile uncertainty when dealing with the diverse and ever more numerous demands of the present, but also a backlash that sees alleged salvation in a more traditional view of the world posited against a striving for progress and change — and it is not clear where this will lead. Linked to this is a withdrawal into the private realm and away from events in the outside world, partly as a form of self-protection and partly as an emotional state of being that is often termed melancholy.

This is a little reminiscent of a famous passage in Robert Musil’s epochal work The Man without Qualities (1930): ​“If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.” Musil’s character Ulrich is unable to commit to anything in earnest and avoids all fixed definition concerning his own life, wishing to keep new options and constellations open. In this sense of possibility, which Musil also saw as a collateral campaign alongside the reality of the decline of the Austrian Habsburg monarchy and its ​“Kakania” at the transition from pre-modernism to modernism, there is a significant tendency toward a melancholy view of the world that oscillates between doubt, envy, resentment, self-hatred, and irony, and also devotion, suggestiveness, and zeal, in the genuine negativity of which there resides plenty of productive power.

Especially artists from Serbia and this sweeping region that is so curtly termed the Balkans, and to which some would also count Austria, are readily said to embody this inner scission between the good old days, the crises of the present with inflation, Corona, and war, and the new unknown that leads to a melancholy view of the world, a philosophical surety concerning their own hitherto preserved strengths in the search for their own personal approach, which can be charged with doubt and conflicts but yet still looks to the future. It is no coincidence that this is very reminiscent of Austrian history to this day, and also of Serbia and its relations to Yugoslavia, with a partly shared and interlaced past again and again returning with the energy of a surreal black box and with a strong affinity to melancholy.

The exhibition Future of Melancholia aims to explore and present this melancholic imprint in the form of a dialogue between equals conducted by artists from the past and from the present generation from both Serbia and Austria. This will take place in two nearly simultaneous exhibitions at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in Graz and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Gallery-Legacy of Milica Zorić & Rodoljub Čolaković). A carefully curated selection of Serbian artists will be presented in Graz and Austrian artists in Belgrade.

In this context, it seems promising to include a number of different exemplary historical positions, in order to be able to relate questions of modernity then and now and their appertaining melancholic worldviews to each other. Here, we in particular take a close look at the surreal in its historical and contemporary points of reference, showing continuities and shifts in the views and representations of melancholy, which unfold a certain timelessness and resilience beyond their apparent circumstances.

The starting point of the exhibition in Graz, which presents three generations of Serbian artists with diverse approaches to surrealism, was the Belgrade surrealist group around Marko Ristić, in which artists such as Stevan Živadinović – Vane Bor, Radojica Živanović Noe, Alexander Vučo, and Dušan Matić engaged in frequent exchange in the 1920s and 1930s. This group was not just an artistic and surrealist avant-garde but also in their politics, since they entered into dialogue with international artists beyond national borders, in particular with other surrealist movements in Paris, Ljubljana, and Trieste. They also saw modernism critically and even symbolically broke with it. 

After World War II, from the 1950s to the 1990s many Serbian artists referred back to this first generation of Serbian surrealists, and this younger generation became known as neo-surrealists. They included Ilija Bašičević, Ljiljana Blaževska, Kosara Bokšan, Olga Jevrić, Bogoljub Jovanović, Radomir Reljić, Leonid Šejka, Sava Sekulić, and Milica Zorić. These artists were not, however, organized as a group working together and in constant exchange with one another. Rather each of them went their own way. But they can still be seen within a line of continuity in Serbian surrealism, and thus here as a second generation. They also present a kind of dialogic response to the exhibition Fantastic Surrealists that was shown in 2023 in HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, which focused on a new interpretation of Austrian Fantastic Realism in terms of the movement’s relationship to surrealism.

As a last part of this exhibition, the focus is on contemporary Serbian positions and their relations to their predecessors. In the complex times in which we live, these artists address symptoms of melancholy and nostalgia and present an introspective view of their emotional worlds. These artists, who work with post-surrealist trends, include Lidija Delić, Biljana Đurđević, Milena Dragicevic, Vukadin Filipović, Marko Obradović, Marija Šević, Ivan Tabaković, Saša Tkačenko, and Nina Zeljković, all of whom react to the present by means of surreal, fantastic, and also melancholy and sometimes rather somber visions. This distance from the everyday world of politics accompanied by a focus on the private is shared not only with earlier generations of artists in Serbia, but also with their Austrian peers, whose work is shown in Belgrade. But this is not a phenomenon specific to this or any other region, as melancholy, as articulated in the surreal and fantastic in contemporary artistic practice, is rather a global matter that this exhibition addresses by looking closely at Austria and Serbia.

Future of Melancholia
Further exhibition venues:

Future of Melancholia
Kamilla Bischof, Flora Hauser, Katharina Höglinger, Ernst Yohji Jaeger, Nanna Kaiser, Matthias Noggler, Maruša Sagadin, Anna Schachinger, Klaus Schuster, Lisa Slawitz, Susanne Wenger
8.3. – 4.5.2025
Gallery-Legacy of Milica Zorić & Rodoljub Čolaković
Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (MoCAB)
Rodoljuba Čolakovića 2, 11000 Belgrade

Philipp Timischl: Molded
8.3. – 4.5.2025
Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (MoCAB)
Pariska 14, 11000 Belgrade