Painter Predrag Đaković from Prague will represent Serbia at the 61st Venice Art Biennale In 2026, the project with the working title "Through Golgotha to Resurrection", which was submitted by the Archives of Vojvodina.
The project was selected at a competition in the name of Ministry of Culture announced by the Museum of Contemporary Art and published on the Ministry's website on September 6.
The competition was realized in a short time
The application deadline was only one month, and the decision on the chosen project was already signed by the Minister of Culture, Nikola Selaković, on November 26. Given that more than half of the tenders announced by the Ministry for project co-financing have been waiting for the result since the end of March, the expediency in this case attracts attention.
One of the conditions of the competition was that the planned funds for production should be up to 14.000.000,00 dinars.
The competition decision was published on the website of the Ministry, but not on the website of the Museum of Contemporary Art. It contains the Commission's explanation, but no information about Đaković's competitors, so it is not known whether there were any at all.
The Commission included: art historian, curator and acting director of the Serbian Academy of Fine Arts, Marijana Kolarić; Until recently, the director of the Museum of the City of Belgrade, Jelena Medaković, and now the city secretary for culture of Belgrade, the commissioner of Serbia's performance at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024; Acting Assistant Minister in the Sector for International Relations and European Integration in Culture Stanko Blagojević; acting assistant minister in the sector for contemporary creativity Miodrag Ivanović; sculptor Miodrag Miša Rogan, who it was pointed out was the representative of Serbia at the first Biennale in Malta in 2024.
Đaković's team
Predrag Đaković's team includes curators Tomaš Koudela and Olga Čučković, and photographer Zvonimir Segi.
Social networks claim that the two curators are unknown to the local cultural public, and state that Koudela is a Czech, a professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ostrava, while Olga Čučković is a licensed tourist guide of Rome and the Vatican.
What constitutes a winning entry
It was explained that Đaković's project will represent a cycle of works that question the relationship between history and identity, opening up the question of how an individual survives under the pressure of the past and ideology. They are based on "the idea that art does not serve to aestheticize, but to testify. That is why his paintings act as interior frescoes of a modern man."
The installation in the Serbia pavilion will be conceived as a "space of silence", an environment in which the observer "enters into a dialogue with his own memory, fears and responsibility".
"The artist builds a bridge between the past and the future, showing that a wound can become a place of transformation, but offers clarity: a person must look at what he has repressed in order to move on. In the context of global crises, wars and migrations, Đaković's work becomes extremely relevant. He reminds us that humanism is not a theoretical position, but a moral obligation. The artist frees the painting from decorativeness and restores to it the power of inner expression", stated the Commission and pointed out that his approach to painting as an ethical act "positions him as one of the most important contemporary authors coming from this region".
Djaković in Serbia
His appearance at the Biennale, as assessed, will be "a contribution to the international dialogue on memory, identity and conscience". In this sense, as stated, his work "is not only the choice of the Commission, it is the choice of the times we live in".
After learning about the selection, Đaković emphasized on social networks that he was happy and proud and that he deeply thanked the Commission, his collaborators, the Ministry of Culture, the Archives of Vojvodina and the Ministry of Education and Culture. As he stated, they have a lot of work ahead of them to bring to an end a large project of 320 square meters of paintings, installations, figures, projections, and 14.600 artifacts that were used during the creation of this work.
Predrag Đaković was born in 1964, and has been living and working in Prague for decades, where he studied at the Academy of Arts. Serbia got to know him in 2018 thanks to the monograph "Peđa ephemeris of a drawing", published by the Institute of Culture of Vojvodina, the documentary film "Back to the roots" directed by Nenad Onjenović, and an exhibition in Novi Sad - all on the occasion of thirty years of career. Last year, he exhibited in the Matica Srpska Gallery, at the "Prayer as Mercy" exhibition.
Social networks are commenting that Serbia will be represented at the Biennale in Venice by an artist who is rarely or not at all present in Serbia.
Source: SEEcult
