The Present as Found

Curator: Dajana Bilbija

The divergent practices of the Zvono Award finalists—Ljiljana Arsić, Isidora Branković, Mustafa Mlinarević, and Emina Veladžić—have shaped a media-heterogeneous exhibition. Although their works cannot be unified by a common thematic or formal framework, they reveal a certain closeness in the position the artists occupy in the contemporary social moment. The title The Present as Found stems from their generational position and the socio-political horizon within which they were formed. They grew up within a reality they did not choose, but whose structures, values, contradictions and unresolved issues they inherited as the framework of their experience. The title therefore names the position from which they critically reconsider the present in which they have found themselves.

The winner of the Zvono Award, Emina Veladžić, re-examines the relationship of the individual to institutional and technological systems that mediate experience. Her work Incubation, based on the artist’s experience, questions how systems produce versions of reality that acquire institutional authority. An official police report about harassment becomes part of the artwork, reducing the experience to the statement that an unidentified man “addressed the complainant by her name.” The document preserves an official version despite the difference between the administrative account and her experience. Its title refers to “incubation” as the creation of controlled conditions in which, in the artist’s words, a “formalized untruth” is sustained. Placed in a heated metal drawer, the document becomes the center of a system whose heat turns reading it into a physical experience that engages the viewer and produces discomfort.

Isidora Branković examines how political, social, and economic factors shape personal and collective identity. In Kiss me softly, she starts from sending stray dogs from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Germany for adoption, using the fable to raise questions of migration, belonging and idealization of a foreign system. The absurd claim that Bosnia and Herzegovina borders Germany points to a symbolic closeness shaped by decades of migration and the image of Germany as a “promised land.” Neutering, as a condition for departure, becomes a metaphor for adapting to a new system. The accompanying text adds a generational dimension through “If only my grandfather had gone to Germany,” connecting the possibility of a different present to previous generations.

With Mustafa Mlinarević, the exhibition’s perspective shifts toward personal heritage, where artifacts of the past shape memory and the present. Objects of Meaning combines photographs of staged scenes with an installation in the form of a window frame, exploring how inherited objects become carriers and mediators of memory. Belonging to deceased people from the artist’s surroundings, they function as material traces that maintain and evoke their memory. Removed from their original context and placed in imaginary settings evoking a recognizable family home, they become open to projections of other people’s memories. By inviting viewers to recognize elements of their own homes and recall loved ones, Mlinarević transforms individual loss into a broader, shared experience.

Ljiljana Arsić approaches the past through the traces of those who experienced it directly. In Dialogue, she brings her mother’s experience of wartime Foča into relation with her own experience of growing up after the war in the same city. The sentence, “We listened to some stories about a time that we didn’t see,” defines a generation that did not directly experience the war but grew up in a post-war reality shaped by its consequences. The dialogue between mother and daughter opens the possibility of a different relationship toward the inherited past, so that the present, although shaped by it, does not remain entirely determined by it.

By bringing together different artistic practices, The Present as Found indicates that the reality we find cannot be viewed separately from the processes, structures, and legacies that preceded it and continue to act within it. The present remains a space for establishing one’s relationship and participating in its shaping.

The exhibition is realized with the support of Residency Unlimited and the Trust for Mutual Understanding from New York.