Archaeology of the Modern (2025)

KCB – The Cultural Centre of Belgrade

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A reflective surface with a blue and white Hotel Jugoslavija sticker, and a handwritten note reflected.
An art gallery with three black and white photographs on the left wall and a framed colored artwork on the background wall, with wooden flooring and white walls.
A white gallery wall with a colorful photograph of a modern building featuring red, blue, yellow, and gray panels. The photograph is illuminated by a spotlight, and there is a subtle blue light on a nearby pillar.
Three black-and-white photographs of minerals or rocks, displayed in a row on a gallery wall.
An art gallery with a white wall, a framed colorful piece of artwork, and a tiled floor.
Empty art gallery with pink lighting, a framed black-and-white photograph on the wall, wooden floor, and a large glass window with pink and red neon lights.
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A door with a red-tinted glass panel, surrounded by white LED strip lighting, with a view of a city street reflected in the glass.
Framed abstract artwork with geometric patterns and fiery colors on a pink wall.
Outdoor scene viewed through a red-tinted filter, showing buildings, trees, umbrellas, and a person standing on tiled pavement.
An art gallery with pink walls, wooden flooring, and a few artworks on the walls. There is a black and white photograph on the far wall. The room features large windows with closed blinds, some illuminated with pink and red lighting reflections.
Four white shadow box frames mounted on a pink wall, each containing a black-and-white photograph of a spherical sculpture with colorful internal patterns, with slight variations and light reflections.
An empty art gallery with white walls, a wooden floor, and a few framed artworks. There is a black piano with a bench near the back wall. Neon lights cast pink and blue reflections on the windows and floor.

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 Bizumic’s 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 object-hood of analog photography.

The exhibition communicates through through the conditions of its presentation. At the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, this becomes especially evident: an embodied encounter in which arrangement, coloured light, outside views, and institutional setting merge to produce meaning. It offers the exhibition as something emergent within the viewer’s interaction with the environment, where perception and affect are as critical as interpretation.