The Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro announces the opening of an exhibition by visual artist Siniša Ilić, titled In the Garden of Bodies, Instruments, and Afternoon Sun, which will take place on Thursday, June 26, 2025, at 7 PM, on the first floor of Petrović Castle.

In this ambient installation, Siniša Ilić builds a narrative, choreographed display through the medium of wall sculpture and textile interventions, where works from the Collection of Art from Non-Aligned Countries, in dialogue with selected archival materials, are activated as spaces of resistance to binary narratives and invited to open up new perspectives on historical relations.

“At the heart of the exhibition flow is an encounter with the Angklung – a traditional musical instrument from Bangladesh, which takes the artist back to the music education classrooms of late-socialist Belgrade, where this instrument functioned as a pedagogical bridge between everyday life and the Yugoslav geopolitics of solidarity,” notes the exhibition’s curator Natalija Vujošević.

Ilić introduces eleven carefully selected works from the Non-Aligned Collection into the dialogical structure of the exhibition, focusing on themes of tenderness, longing, everyday utopias, and intimate forms of resistance. His own interventions in the form of drawings, video, textiles, and archival material create a vibrant network of meanings between the artworks, the audience, and the space.

“The choreographed narrative structure of the exhibition positions the Non-Aligned Collection as a living architecture of multi-temporal frequencies – where bodies, instruments, and shifting light shapes a new place of belonging: both sensitive and political,” Vujošević concludes.

Siniša Ilić (1977, Belgrade) is a visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice stems from drawing, which he combines with video, scenography, and installation. Reflecting on social tensions, cultural heritage, forms of labor, and modes of nurturing friendship and solidarity, Ilić reshapes and establishes new connections to create choreographed settings where documentary, poetic, and affective elements intersect. The former Yugoslav region and the relationship between the Global South and the West are key reference fields in his work.
Selected exhibitions include: Behind the Tide, MMSU Rijeka, 2025; Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales, Art Encounters, Timișoara, 2025; Cut-Line-Imprint, MoCA Belgrade; No Feeling is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, 2023; The Public and the Space, CZKD Belgrade; Bigger Than Myself, MAXXI Rome, 2021; Southern Constellations, MG+MSUM Ljubljana, 2019.

The exhibition will remain on view until September 5, 2025, and is realized within the framework of the Laboratory of the Non-Aligned Art Collection project.