Ivana Ivković

We are pleased to invite you to Ivana Ivković‘s solo exhibition COM/PASSION with an opening performance and accompanying publication at the gallery of Faculty of Fine Arts (FLU Gallery) opening on May 16.

On view: 16 May – 7 June
Gallery of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade

The exhibition COM/PASSION follows Ivana Ivković’s artistic practice over the past twenty years, establishing continuity with her first solo exhibition of drawings in 2006, held in the same gallery. Rather than functioning as a retrospective, the project operates as a spatial and temporal mapping of an ongoing practice, opening the possibility to reconsider earlier works from a contemporary perspective and through newly established relations. The exhibition and the accompanying publication are structured through five thematic sections: Since I Met You I Have No Peace, Like There Is No Tomorrow, In Him We Trust, Monuments, and Trust. These sections do not represent closed phases, but overlapping problem-fields that return and intersect, forming a continuous investigation of the relationships between the body, the collective, history, and systems of power.

Since I Met You I Have No Peace, 2012, Ivana Ivković, New Zealand wool, 260 x 165 cm, edition of 3 + 1 AP
Photo: Ivan Zupanc

COM/PASSION is not merely a title, but an epistemological framework for artistic practice at the intersection of empathy and the political dynamics of affect. The semantic play within the word establishes a field of tension between compassion as an ethical imperative and passion as a driving force of creation, mapping intersections between the intimate and the collective, the subjective and the historical, the singular and the systemic. The works do not function solely as documents of time, but as instruments of anticipation: they sense, intuitively register, and articulate what is yet to come. What once existed as personal reflection or inner struggle becomes a visual record of temporal cyclicality and recurring patterns. Within this framework, the work Since I Met You I Have No Peace (2012) transforms into a new visual articulation in 2025: the original phrase is erased, leaving only NO PEACE as a marker of permanent instability — an ontological constant of contemporaneity.

The installation Like There Is No Tomorrow, originally realized in Beirut in 2015, is now reinscribed within a post-catastrophic landscape: the artistic act functions both as testimony and as a semiotic warning, illuminating fragile temporal thresholds between past, present, and latent futures. The exhibition unfolds through five spatial segments corresponding to the publication, creating a dialogue between different temporal layers and artistic approaches. The works trace the emergence of certain questions and intuitions, following their development over time and revealing how their meanings shift across changing contexts. As time passes, earlier works are re-read and reactivated, often disclosing an unexpected precision — what once appeared as personal reflection or speculative gesture now resonates as anticipation, as if the work had already sensed the conditions that would later unfold. The opening includes a performance that activates the space of the former iconic Akademija club, as well as the body as a carrier of meaning, further emphasizing the relationship between individual experience and the collective potential for change and resistance. The exhibition points to the urgency of connection, collective awareness, and continuous exchange — because art, however rooted in the personal, always presupposes the presence of the other.