Spanning two sites across the city of Belgrade, Early Works puts the work of artists Piotrek Kowalski and Pavle Nikolić in conversation. Simultaneously showing bodies of work by these artists in Čubra and Autokomanda, the exhibitions stage themselves as both proposition and provocation. Borrowing the language of institutional retrospection, the use of the term ‘early works’ asks us to imagine a future looking back, while its para-institutional format resists monumentality and fixed value. What emerges instead is an intimate, time-conscious encounter with works that are not newly made but newly reconsidered, allowing presence, material, and perception to carry the weight of the exhibition’s inquiry.
Across both artists’ practices, time appears as something slightly misaligned. At Autokomanda, Piotrek Kowalski’s sculptures, which are composed of familiar, almost banal forms like droplets or footprints, disrupt the expectation of sculptural grandeur. These gestures conjure a ghostly temporality, suggesting objects that remember more than they declare. Kowalski’s materials hover between usefulness and refusal, evoking human experience while remaining resolutely inanimate.
Pavle Nikolić’s False Friends series, on the other hand, counters this material presence through photographic disorientation. What first reads as an expansive landscape collapses into the shallow spaces beneath beds, asking viewers to physically mirror the artist’s own position, that of lying on the floor, to fully see the images. At Čubra, his photographs continue this perceptual subversion, folding the viewer’s reflection back into the work and quietly linking both sites through embodied repetition.
Early Works constructs spaces of quiet cohesion. Through the dialogue surrounding scale, perception, and temporal drift that emerges between Kowalski and Nikolić, the exhibition’s success lies in how this conversation unfolds spatially and bodily: viewers are asked to move between sites, to bend, crouch, and reorient themselves, becoming attuned to subtle misalignments of time and presence. This embodied attentiveness deepens the show’s retrospective conceit, lending it a haunted quality, where objects feel slightly out of sync with the present, as though already filtered through memory.
At the same time, this atmosphere operates with deliberate restraint. The temporal cues, such as the watch running ahead, the shifting scales, the recursive viewpoints, are precise rather than overt, which raises a productive tension between affect and cognition. For some visitors, the sense of haunting may register viscerally through physical engagement and spatial repetition; for others, it may remain a conceptual undercurrent. Yet it is precisely this ambiguity that sustains the exhibition’s impact. Rather than prescribing an experience, Early Works trusts its audience to negotiate meaning through attention, positioning, and time spent, allowing the exhibition to linger as a question rather than resolve as a statement.
Review text by Charles Moore
