Belgrade’s standout exhibitions of the moment

Belgrade is the city where I grew up, the city where I create, and the one I share an unbreakable bond with. Lately, the cultural and artistic scene has been facing serious challenges—from the lack of space and financial support to global shifts that inevitably affect us as well. Despite it all, this city has an incredible ability to generate new creative energy.

I want to highlight a few current exhibitions that, through different media and perspectives, showcase Belgrade’s art scene and its ability to stay relevant. These exhibitions bring the right mix of inspiration, innovation, and playfulness—perfect for anyone who wants to experience the city’s spirit through art, whether you’re here for just a few days or looking to add something new to your weekend.

Living Matter, Dying Matter

Sveta Šer explores contemporary materiality through transformation, decay, and the re-establishment of relationships between humans and their surroundings. Starting from an “archaeology of the present,” she focuses on objects that have lost their original function and crossed the threshold of usefulness. Through both visual and conceptual work, the artist engages in a dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology and the idea of “things in themselves” — objects that exceed function and fixed meaning. The exhibition raises questions about the limits of visibility and the possibility for art to capture moments of transformation that usually pass unnoticed.

WHERE? Galerija Kula Cetinjska
WHEN? until December 21st

Photo: Bojana Filipović

Symposium

Filip Savković’s exhibition “Symposium” represents a logical continuation of his long-standing interest in love as a universal human experience. By drawing directly onto the gallery walls, Savković transforms the space into a kind of temple, divided into three sections that trace the life of a couple, loss, and reunion. Through a syncretic fusion of references from ancient, Eastern, and contemporary cultures, the artist constructs a visual narrative of love as a force that binds life and death. The figures, anachronistically positioned between past and present, invite the viewer to a personal, open-ended reading of the myth.

WHERE? Art space U10

WHEN? until December 27

Filip Savković, u10

ROOM 0

From the text by the exhibition curator Jelena Pavićević: The exhibition ROOM 0 by artist Isidora Branković approaches the body as a central instrument for analyzing, resisting, and representing socio-economic, class, and biopolitical relations. The artist treats the body as a site where institutional codes and social norms are inscribed, but also as a material element capable of articulating fractures within the order that defines it. In this sense, ROOM 0 moves beyond the spatial definition of an exhibition and operates as a zero-degree space of subjectivation, a field where identity becomes layered through its interaction with capitalist, post-Yugoslav, and neoliberal structures of power.

The works on view performatively activate different modalities of subjective experience: exposure, burden, blockage, sensory deprivation, ritual transmission of voice, horizontal feminist cohesion, the crossing of professional and class boundaries, as well as mechanisms of humiliation and sexualization. These gestures do not function only through narrative; they operate as micropolitical interventions that map overlapping regimes of visibility: what is recognized as art, what is recorded as labor, and what remains invisible or depoliticized in everyday life.

WHERE?Belgrade Youth Center

WHEN? until December 28th

Dom omladine Beograd

NEW EROTICA

On Saturday, December 20, the exhibition NEW EROTICA will open at Kvaka 22 in Belgrade. The exhibition is an artistic project that explores female eroticism from the perspective of the female gaze and restores subjectivity to the body. Admission is free, and visitors will also have the opportunity to purchase an exclusive calendar created during the realization of the project. NEW EROTICA questions the representation of the female body throughout the history of visual art and creates a new, authentic space of female sensuality.

The series consists of eight photographs of women in different environments, during physical labor, in nature, in training, or during intimate self-pleasure, extending to highly stylized fashion scenes. Each photograph explores a unique relationship between a woman, her body, the space, and the camera. Women are not portrayed as objects of desire, but as the main agents of their own pleasure and sexuality. The project does not insist on a single aesthetic, but reflects diversity in approach, relationship with the camera, and degree of nudity, aligned with the natural energy of each photographed woman. In certain scenes, motifs from the canon of the sexualization of women, such as a mechanic’s workshop, undergo a new contextual transformation.

The creative team behind the project includes Jelena Pantelić (creative direction, photography, and design), Milica Terzić (creative direction and production), Emilija Terzić (photography and design), and Ana Ostojić (production). NEW EROTICA is an ode to female eroticism seen from within, intimate and liberating. The opening night will be accompanied by a music program featuring Banger Manger 1312 and Boogie Boys.

WHERE? Kvaka 22

WHEN? until December 31

Turning Points Toward Modernity: The Art of Society 1900–1945

This exhibition, which will remain open for the next two years, marks the beginning of a new long-term cycle at the Museum, through which three major presentations will reaffirm the value of its collection, spanning artworks from 1900 to the present day. The first part of the cycle, Turning Points Toward Modernity: The Art of Society 1900–1945, offers a layered reading of the development of art in Serbia and Yugoslavia during the first half of the 20th century.

Through more than 400 works by 150 artists, the Museum presents its collection not as a linear sequence of styles, but as a heritage that continues to shape our understanding of both art and society. The exhibition guides visitors through chronological and thematic chapters: from the first modernist breakthroughs and avant-garde experiments, to the artistic practices of the 1930s that reflect social divisions and introspective questioning. The thematic framework explores the city and the bourgeois identity as chroniclers of modernization, the portrait as the “face of an era,” movement through form and body, and sculpture and relief as possibilities of spatial expression.

A special focus is placed on the Portrait of an Artist series, featuring key figures of pre-war modernism such as Petar Dobrović, Sava Šumanović, Milena Pavlović Barilli, and Nadežda Petrović. The curatorial team—Mišela Blanuša, Dr. Rajka Bošković, and Žaklina Ratković, presents the collection as a dialogue between art and society, reaffirming its significance and the Museum’s central role in preserving and interpreting cultural heritage.

WHERE? Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade
WHEN? until March 1, 2027

Photo: Muzej savremene umetnosti Beograd

9 SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Across three venues of the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, seven exhibitions have opened as part of the project 9 Solo Exhibitions. In the Art Gallery, works are presented by Nina Ivanović, Milica Crnobrnja Vukadinović, and Goran Despotovski; in the Podroom Gallery, by Ana Mušćet and Mladen Bundalo; and in the Artget Gallery, by Filip Rađenović and Luka Trajković.

Due to budget cuts, the curatorial team of the Cultural Centre decided to merge projects originally planned for the second half of the year into one joint exhibition period. The title of the project also alludes to two exhibitions that could not be realized. Nina Ivanović, in Topčiderka, explores the fate of the Belgrade river and the consequences of human neglect, while Milica Crnobrnja Vukadinović, in Micro Territories, guides visitors through intimate spaces of solitude. Goran Despotovski’s Ascending/Descending (ASC/DESC) features depersonalized figures symbolizing helplessness and inauthenticity. Mladen Bundalo’s Domus Vulgaris examines the home as a living entity with its own history and the challenges of contemporary life. Ana Mušćet’s Corpus: Passion Fruit. Albedo reflects on collective trauma through a video and site-specific installation inspired by those forcibly taken during the Homeland War.

Filip Rađenović’s Charge presents drag characters marked by visible traces of violence, emphasizing the experiences of LGBT+ individuals, while Luka Trajković’s Where I’m Calling From uses photography to convey a cinematic, narrative sensitivity toward untold stories and delicate, almost imperceptible moments.

The 9 Solo Exhibitions project demonstrates how the Cultural Centre of Belgrade responds to financial and social challenges, reaffirming its commitment to supporting contemporary artists and fostering dialogue about whom culture belongs to and for whom it is created.

WHERE? Cultural Centre of Belgrade
WHEN? until December 31

Early Works

The exhibition Early Works brings together works by artists Piotrek Kowalski and Pavle Nikolić across two Belgrade locations: Čubra in Gradić Pejton and Autokomanda at Tikveška 1. The title plays with institutional language and the idea of a future retrospective, while the split display questions the value, format, and intimacy of exhibiting. Through sculptures that shift the notion of monumentality and photographs that alter perceptions of space and scale, the exhibition explores the relationship between the body, time, and the gaze. The works are not new, but are deliberately presented as a small-scale retrospective, close, quiet, and personal.

WHERE? Art spaces Čubra and Autokomanda

WHEN? until January 23, 2026

Photo: Vanja Žunić

Lutalaštvo

The exhibition Lutalaštvo (Wandering) is part of a series of works by Mirjana Boba Stojadinović dedicated to travel, examining it through the lens of modes of transportation such as ships, trains, cars, buses, and airplanes, the history of travel, its psychological significance, and the artist’s personal experience of the travel process. The exhibition takes the form of an ambient installation that includes the artist’s photographs and sounds recorded during journeys, as well as texts written in 2020 that contain a subjective narrative of events or, more often, anti-events from travel. Transportation is a mechanism that has enabled nearly everything that defines contemporary civilization, from heavy industry to tourism, as well as migration, trade, and cultivation. However, it also enables a process of physical displacement and distancing from the familiar, that is, entering the unknown as a spiritual challenge through which the self is questioned. It is precisely this aspect of travel that the artist explores in the work Wandering, focusing on the subjectivity of the travel experience. An artistic work devoted to sojourning is not accidental in a time of a severe pandemic, not as an escapist response to the gravity of the situation, but as a refuge for the potential of humanity that we carry within us.

WHERE? Kolarac Art Gallery

WHEN? until January 30, 2026

Kolarac Art Gallery

Heterocosmies

The solo exhibition by Marina Popović, Heterocosmies: Multiple Spaces of the Image, opened on December 15 at the Kuća Legata. The exhibition presents a selection of works created between 1999 and 2024, including large-format paintings, pictorial installations, drawings, terracotta sculptures, and prints. Starting from the idea of possible worlds, Marina Popović develops the image as a living field that extends beyond the frame and expands into space, creating multiple readings and actively engaging the visitor in the experience of the work. The exhibition traces the development of her oeuvre from early figurative paintings to contemporary spatial-pictorial structures in which the image becomes an environment and an event. Heterocosmies are not a collection of individual works, but a network of relationships between image, space, memory, and gesture, in which meaning is shaped through movement. As part of the exhibition, video works by students Tanja Maksimov and Jovan Bogdanović will also be presented. The exhibition is dedicated to Professor Milan Blanuša. Curator: Mirko Kokir.

WHERE? Kuća Legata

WHEN? until January 9, 2026

Kuća Legata, Marina Popović

If you feel like experiencing art outside Belgrade

As even the birds on the branches already know, I am always in favor of decentralization, and the more things happen outside Belgrade, the more willing I am to travel to cities in my own country that I have never visited before. What could be a better pre-holiday road trip idea than, for example, a quick getaway to Jagodina, where, alongside the beautiful nature you will encounter in the landscapes of Šumadija, excellent art awaits you as well.

Lazar Vujaklija: Protest Toward the Self

On December 16, the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Jagodina opened the exhibition “Lazar Vujaklija: Protest Toward the Self,” the first institutional, comprehensive overview of the work of an artist who inscribed Yugoslav and Serbian art of the second half of the 20th century with a line that both cuts and caresses. In the spirit of BOLD, this is not merely an exhibition, but a map of a thinking hand: how painting becomes a process, how line constructs space, how shadow transforms into meaning. Through 170 works, including painting, printmaking, drawing, tapestry, mural, poster, illustration, sculpture, and carpet design, the exhibition, curated by Dr. Rajka Bošković and Miroslav Karić, reveals Vujaklija’s “painterly alphabet” and his enduring curiosity toward material and form. Rather than following a chronological order, the curatorial concept organizes the oeuvre into six thematic sections: Duchampian Gesture, Appropriation, Anticipation, Ambivalence, Anachronicity, and the Democratization of Art, precise stations of a defiant poetics that refuses to fit into a single frame.

WHERE? Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Jagodina

WHEN? until May 24, 2026

The exhibition “Lazar Vujaklija: Protest Toward the Self”, the first major retrospective return to an artist who was constantly moving forward, Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Jagodina, Lazar Vujaklija