Out of the Blue, I'm Swept Away
May 8–November 22, 2026
Commissioner: Vladislav Šćepanović
Curator: Svetlana Racanović
Organization: Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro
In his controversial 1999 lecture and later essay “Rules for the Human Park: A Response to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism,” Peter Sloterdijk views cultures and civilisations as “anthropogenic greenhouses”, governed through domestication, training, control, and various “programs of social gardening”. Within this boxed, anthropic life, there is no space for vitality, naturalness or transformation.
Siniša Radulović’s multimedia installation Out of the Blue, I’m Swept Away (2026) creates a lower, “basement-like”, moulded zone and an upper, ethereal, fluid zone filled with images. In the “subterranean” sphere, the artist begins from the floorplan of his own living space as a matrix that he multiplies into an architectural pattern that expands progressively into a claustrophobic, unpoetic, denaturalised and depersonalised, almost dystopian space. The artist applies the mechanics and logic of this “mass ornament” not only to parcel the space through rigid matrix and modularity but also to “clone” and serially, schematically produce human figurines which he implants into these capsules. Those male and female figurines are not individuals, families, partnerships, tribes nor do they create a community or society. As inert, petrified, asexual humanoids or replicants they become the “natural” or the only possible inhabitants-décor of these spaces, the sole entities that could be (re)produced and incubated within the aseptic grid of this pseudo-architecture. This world enchants and haunts us because we see ourselves mirrored in it, as if in a demonstrative micro-laboratory that extracts and abstracts our living environment and the ways in which we inhabit it.
Across this glass surface, as certain plane of existence or a liminal zone that both absorbs and reflects, the viewer glides towards the “horizon line”, where their eye meets more images, this time moving images. Within these images, a part of a body surfaces occasionally, a possible erogenous zone in outline, in fragments: a hand, a thigh, hair, a grazing touch. This body is not consistent but shifts in an elegant, soft modulation between solidity and fluidity, between incarnation and disappearance. Diffused within a pale yellow “incandescence”, the body slides, floats, vibrates and transforms within a “smooth” space where, instead of an archaeology of experiences, memories and projections, prevails the physiology of the moment, sensation and flicker. Before these images, the observer, out of the blue, becomes untethered, unconditioned, impermanent, unbounded, in a sweet state of derive, allowing oneself to be carried by the compelling forces of the moment.
These flickers are captured too in a separately exhibited series of small-format photographs on glass plates. Produced in old, analogue photographic wet-collodion process, they are unique images, entities without doubles, gifts of the unrepeatable. The objects within them hover between toy, souvenir, model, private memorabilia, relic of the past and dream-object, between a crafted, industrial or artistically created object. As such, they offer themselves to both zones as something lost and optional, missing and untethered, dispersed in the flow of time yet found, seized in the flash of a moment. This constellation of photographs represents a possible route for background interference between the two zones: the solid structures beneath the glass and the moving images above the glass plane.
The “ode” to the analogue is also contained in the sounds shape the ambience of the entire work. It is a hushed symphonic weave of sounds that drift simultaneously from the everyday environment, from familiarity and proximity, and seem to pulse from some distant place of beguiling indistinctness. They oscillate between White Noise and Pink Noise as a wave-like existence, in ebb and flow, in perpetual arriving and departing. The analogue also appears through a concrete object, a vintage photographic enlarger suspended in empty space like a strange unidentified anti-gravitational device. It projects a transparent photograph, an image of a blossoming cherry branch. The gentle swaying of the apparatus creates the impression that the branch itself is softly moving, endowing the technical image with softness, sensuousness and warmth.
Out of the Blue, I’m Swept Away reveals the kaleidoscopic, contingent, imagistic as essential to the very existence of the world, to life itself. In a condition of absolute proliferation of images, we tend towards becoming translated into image. Instead of lamenting the disappearance of the original or referent, the crucial question becomes: from what kinds of images may art or life today build a refuge?
The symbolic, semantic and sensorial parameters of our work are not directed solely towards simulating a post-apocalyptic universe, nor staging a dystopian reality, nor presenting a world in shards that we nostalgically long to patch together with images. Nor does it prioritise constructing a light habitat from fluid images at the threshold of the imaginary, dreamlike or elusive. Rather, it attempts a transversal “sliding”, intersecting and “stitching” across all these registers so that the strict, sharp lines of division, enclosure, parcelling, isolation may be rendered soft, pliant, permeable, fluid. This allows the forces of compression and dispersion, the sterile and the atmospheric, the reflective and the absorptive, the digital and the analogue, space and viewer, the micro and the macro, nature and apparatus to align and integrate. At this intersection, along this horizon, we build a dwelling made out of images that we select, unwind, personalise, share, establishing a kind of ecology of images. These images enable both the endless unwinding of the film of life and the precious “resting” of life in the micro-moments of its blossoming—in bright images of transience that know neither the burden of time nor the sorrow of disappearance. Such is the image of the cherry blossom, the starting and finishing point of the trajectory traced by Out of the Blue, I’m Swept Away. It is the trace of a possible renewal of human trust in the gift of transience, in the precious moments-images when we find ourselves quietly illuminated by an unbroken sense that we are witnessing the sublime event of life in something ordinary, inconspicuous, negligible – in the reality of images.
