Barbara Knežević: Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates)

Barbara Knežević is an artist based in Dublin who has an enduring interest in how the practice of making sculpture reveals the historical, semiotic and political functions of materials and objects. Her sculptures and installation works have explored the economies, value systems and hierarchies of objects in museological and gallery display, and have acted to materialise and spatialise the belief systems attached to artworks and other cultural objects. Through the practice of sculpture and film making, Barbara Knežević’s most recent projects explore the politics of materials, origin stories and historical narratives that are fragmented and called into question through individual and personal experiences such as migration, displacement and diaspora and the instrumentalisation of sculptural objects in the narratives of identity and nationhood. Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates) locates Knežević’s diasporic Yugoslav identity explicitly in her work for the first time and situates the artist’s family experiences against the backdrop of larger historical narratives of the Danube and the Balkans.

Barbara Knežević’s ambitious new film and sculpture work Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates) will tour to 4 venues across Ireland over the next year. Premiering at Solstice Arts Centre, Navan from March 29–May 30, the exhibition will continue to Sirius Arts Centre Cobh, County Cork, the Wexford Arts Centre and the Regional Cultural Centre, County Donegal. 

The exhibition features a newly commissioned forty-six-minute film and a series of large-scale sculptures that engage with the Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates) region, a deep scenic gorge on the Danube River on the border of Serbia and Romania. The artworks interpret histories, stories, the materiality, and technological developments related to the Iron Gates dam, built in 1964 as a collaborative initiative between the governments of the former Yugoslavia and Romania. Knežević describes this project as a “sculptural film,” a mode of filmmaking where moving images heighten the sensitivities, histories, and material qualities of objects, and where nonhuman actors have agency and power.

The film focuses on the Mesolithic sculptures of Lepenski Vir, considered some of the first European monumental sculptures, that were discovered during preparatory work for the construction of the Iron Gates dam. The narrative, voiced in the first person, gives expression to five non-human, material, infrastructural, animal, and geological actors of the Iron Gates gorge. Composed of original footage captured in Donji Milanovac, Kladovo, and Belgrade, the film’s personal testimonies, interviews, staged imaginings, choreographies, and archival footage, the film oscillates between fact and speculative fiction, using montage as a device to retrace stories of displacement, migration, the culture of making, sculpture, and the natural world on the Danube.

The film is accompanied in the exhibition by sculptures that implement the language of monuments and temporality. They are composed of industrial materials made and processed by the artist’s hand. Welded chain, mesh, and steel have been formed and fabricated alongside more intimate, domestic materials such as ceramic, fabric, stone, and wood. Weaving historical and speculative chapters, the film and sculptures describe a fragmented, selective trajectory of human origins and development, navigating geopolitical shifts in South Eastern Europe and proposing alternative notions of progress.

Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates) is commissioned by Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Co. Meath, with production support provided by the Arts Council of Ireland and the National Sculpture Factory, Cork. Following the presentation at Solstice Arts Centre, the exhibition will travel to Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Co. Cork; Wexford Arts Centre, Co. Wexford. Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal. The tour is organised by Rayne Booth through specific funding provided by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Touring schedule
Solstice Arts Centre: March 29–30, 2025
Sirius Arts Centre: September 27–November 22, 2025
Wexford Arts Centre: February 14–March 20, 2026
Regional Cultural Centre: July 4–September 19, 2026 

Project partners and collaborators 
Major funder: Arts Council of Ireland / Commissioner: Belinda Quirke, Solstice Arts Centre / Funders and supporters: National Sculpture Factory, Cork; Technological University Dublin / Exhibition partners: Solstice Arts Centre, Sirius Arts Centre, Regional Cultural Centre, Wexford Arts Centre / Exhibition curator and touring producer: Rayne Booth / Development of touring supporter: Sirius Arts Centre / Producers: Bilboke Films, Marija Stojnić and Jelena Angelovski / Cinematographer: Duśan Grubin / Editor: Ivan Vasić / Institutional partners in Serbia: Narodni Muzej, Muzej Lepenski Vir.