Archaeology of the Modern (2025)

KCB – The Cultural Centre of Belgrade

Archaeology of the Modern – The Case of Hotel Jugoslavija and Other Psychographies presented three interconnected photo-series by Bizumic: BARYTA (2017–), Hotel Jugoslavija (2011–2025), and UNESCO’s Children (2019–). In a site-sensitive manner, the exhibition explores the relationship between image-making and the unique setting created by the gallery’s expansive windows, which offer a view of Republic Square in Belgrade.

The BARYTA series examines the photographic medium itself, focusing on baryta paper, a key material in photographic printing. The images depict barite mineral samples from the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Bizumic questions the environmental consequences of so-called 'green' energy alternatives, such as lithium for batteries, highlighting the ecological issues often overlooked in narratives of progress.

The Hotel Jugoslavija series investigates the building's fate, first between 2011 and 2013, when it was removed from the list of protected cultural heritage sites, and later, from late 2024 to early 2025, as its demolition became imminent. The photo-collage work explores the decline of modernist ideals and the state’s dismissal of cultural memory, reflecting on the erosion of values such as collective progress.

UNESCO’s Children focuses on the vulnerability of photography and World Heritage sites. The images, hand-printed with the negative displayed alongside the print, challenge the conventional logic of photographic reproduction, emphasising the materiality of the medium.

The exhibition entangles the viewer in a loop of presence and absence, where coloured lighting, double exposure, and collage fracture time itself. The now bleeds into the then, the familiar distorts into the unknown.