a.adamovic.ana@gmail.com
Copyright © Ana Adamovic
Public performance, Bioskop Balkan, Belgrade, October 26th, 2025
Based on the opera The Chimneys on the Adriatic (1949) by Ivo Tijardović
Music: Anja Djordjević
Text: Ana Adamović
The work was created in a dialogue with the only Yugoslav opera dedicated to the People’s Liberation Struggle and the proletarian revolution – The Chimneys on the Adriatic written by composer Ivo Tijardović in 1949.
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The site-specific installation 1400 Days finds its point of departure in the history of the Reichl Palace, which today houses the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Subotica. Namely, the building was originally built back in 1904 by the architect Ferenc Reichl to house both his studio and the family home, and there he invested all his talent as well as capital. However, the family lived here for just under four years, or slightly over 1400 days....
The work is set in the half-abandoned interior of Belgrade Staklenac, a shopping and business centre, built on the city’s main square in 1989. Although erected as a temporary structure, for more than three decades Staklenac housed numerous small or large companies, many of which disappeared together with the country in which the mall was built. Today, it lives under the constant and long-lasting threat of being pulled down to be replaced with an opera house, a contemporary art gallery, and a green area. In this work it briefly becomes a scene where a children’s choir performs parts of the cantata A Humble Song to the Birds by British composer Antony Hopkins. Hopkins wrote the cantata for one high adult voice. Now children, who traditionally represent the voice and symbol of the future, are invited to perform....
What is democracy today, what does it imply and what are the most important inscribed concepts without which democracy cannot function? Is democracy possible? Is there an alternative to democracy? What is the optimal form of democracy? These questions are fundamental for the project Performing Democracy which discusses these issues while creating a space for a dialogue on the state of democracy. ...
The Corridor narrates about the apparent void created by the flow of time, and the nausea that void is causing. For nearly eight hours the work follows a single scene - a hospital corridor. The corridor is empty, illuminated by the existing, hospital neon lighting. While the picture depicts only one, almost invariable scene, noises come from the hospital rooms, ancillary rooms, distant parts of the hospital, suggesting that the complete peace and emptiness of the corridor can be disturbed at any moment. There is no natural light source in the hallway to indicate the arrival of a new day, thus the only landmark for time is the large hospital clock that is constantly ticking while accurately marking passage of every single second. Thus, in the work time becomes the main protagonist, its flow the only certainty, and waiting the only activity....
Wunderkammer questions a possibility of understanding the past, even the very recent one, the one we have a partial memory on, in a present where historical narratives are constantly employed as foundations identities, alliances or conflicts are built upon. The work problematizes the very idea of history’s transparency and intelligibility while questioning its meaning when reduced to a series of more or less visually appealing and almost static images accompanied by nothing more than mechanical sounds or incomprehensible voices with no clearly constructed narrative or a comment which is always written in and by the present. ...
The work questions (self)representational politics of the Museum of African Art founded in 1977 in Belgrade, then the capital of socialist Yugoslavia and one of the leading actors in the Non-aligned movement. It problematize the colonial gaze in the collection displayed in a country with no colonial experience, and politics of representation of artifacts both gathered and offered for pleasure and valorization to the white Europeans. ...
For the last six years, the artistic research of Ana Adamović is dedicated to the examination of childhood experience as a politically and culturally constructed practice that originated and was nourished in a specific social system of the socialist Yugoslavia. ...
Theme park is an on-going photographic visual research into tourism as a global phenomenon. The artist is a tourist herself, thus the photographs from the series are created only during her travels, while visiting amusement or water parks, beaches or numerous touristic attractions - no matter if the “attraction” happens to be an art exhibition or a roller coaster. As a tourist, the artist photographs an image the world offers to her while turning into the theme park....
Project Yugoslavia involves 100 participants of various ages, histories and backgrounds from the region of the former Yugoslavia. Instead of posing specific questions, every participant was given a card with information about an object from the Museum’s collection containing the object’s description, date or period when it was made, and its origin. Through this method we aimed to translate the Museum’s collection of material traces of the past (collection of artifacts) to the form of living comments, ideas, and thoughts for the future....