We invite you to the opening of the exhibition Repurposing: Space and Word by artist Irena Lagator Pejović on Tuesday, May 12, at 8 PM at the MSUCG Gallery.
The exhibition is a response to an invitation by curator Natalija Vujošević to reflect, through the space and example of the MCAM Gallery, on the legacy of Svetlana Kana Radević, the relationship toward the environment, heritage, “transition,” and intergenerational solidarity.
The project explores the actual condition of the lesser-known projects of Svetlana Kana Radević — realized in collaboration with socially owned enterprises such as the Tobacco Factory and the Titograd Waterworks and Sewage Company, as well as the Lexicographic Institute of Montenegro (the gallery space where the exhibition takes place) — pointing to architecture as a practice shaped within specific productive and social conditions. In this sense, the focus shifts away from the architect’s canonized and award-winning works toward projects that testify to the complex relationships between labor, institutions, and the public good.
Avoiding monumentalization and representative narratives, the exhibition takes as its starting point Kana Radević’s own words on architecture as an ethical and social act:
“All decisions are made for people, in the name of people. In the past, the architect worked for the individual; today, they work for society. The relationship between society and art is highly interactive.”
It is precisely the meaning of these words, as well as their contemporary, often invisible and contradictory “repurposings,” that becomes the key site of this reflection — in which locally situated knowledge emerges as a necessary framework for understanding the relationship between space, society, and responsibility.
Through research, conversations, and artistic interventions, the exhibition sheds light on the question of spatial memory — the layers of decisions, compromises, and forgetting — while simultaneously becoming a place of encounter and intergenerational dialogue between the artist and curator, with the involvement of conservator Nađa Baković, in direct relation with the audience. Within this shared field of thought and speech, where experiences are exchanged, traumas mapped, and possible tools for their healing examined, “repurposing” is practiced as a methodology of correction — a return from the performative neoliberal regime to a condition of sociality.
Irena Lagator Pejović is an artist and art theorist whose post-media and post-conceptual practice unfolds at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory, and eco-critical research. Her work investigates the destructive mechanisms of the neoliberal order, the erasure of architectural heritage, the commodification of public space, and the colonization of perception. A central focus of her practice is ecology and the effects of climate change, viewed through the prism of Félix Guattari’s ecosophy of three inseparable registers: the ecological, the social, and the subjective.
She represented Montenegro with the solo exhibition Image Think at the 55th Venice Biennale. Her work has been exhibited at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2026); the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (2026); MG+MSUM in Ljubljana (2022); the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt; MoMCA in Slovenj Gradec (2022); the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Vienna; the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York; White Box Art Center in New York (2016); La Triennale di Milano (2013); MAXXI Museum in Rome (2013); and the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).
Among numerous awards, she is the recipient of the UNESCO Award for the Promotion of the Arts (4th Cetinje Biennial), the award of the international biennial Transforming Memory: The Politics of Images (24th Nadežda Petrović Memorial), and the award of the 4th International Graphic Triennial in Cairo. Her works are included in private and public collections, including FRAC Marseille; Villa Pacchiani, Centro Espositivo, Santa Croce sull’Arno; MSCG Podgorica; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade.