Ambience Art Installation

Equilibrium

The artist: Siniša Radulović

Curator: Svetlana Racanović

 

In Siniša Radulović’s environmental multimedia installation Equilibrium (2026), presented in the former church of Santa Maria in Punta in Budva, the carefully arranged objects and moving images – a lifeless fig tree, videos featuring water, a modified model of Budva’s Old Town, and hybrid book-photographs – coalesce into a harmonious constellation within a place where miracles may seem possible.

With Equilibrium, the building itself, the church-gallery, is being re-sacralized, though not through a return to its original liturgical function, nor through the introduction of a mythical atmosphere, ritual charge, or religious exaltation, but rather through a particular form of epiphany: an artistic one. The former “vocation” of the space, which today houses art, the vocation of a sacred site, is gently softened by the symbolic and affective agency of art and by its transformative potential. At the same time, the building’s original function and the physiognomy of the space continue to bestow a special aura upon the art it shelters. This work engages that gift both wholeheartedly and meticulously.

The equilibrium established within this installation is not the product of a supernatural, mystical force, but of the refined creative attunement of its material components, its “organs and bodies”, with the anatomy and memory of the place that receives and arranges them, and with the viewer’s devoted presence, which oscillates between free surrender to enchantment and a self-aware, inquisitive immersion into the densely woven fabric of its signs, symbols and archetypes.

In the case of Equilibrium, “profane illumination” concerns an authentically artistic, worldly revelation: the creation of a consecrated place, a space of singularity, the establishment of a refined and enduring network of archetypal centres. Water, tree, book, town and image are those centres, elegantly, profoundly and sensitively permeating the space. They constitute the foundations of this spatial-semantic architecture, of this sustainable eco-artistic system within which the “miracles” of regeneration become possible.     (Translated by Jelena Ray Stanovnik)

 

Siniša Radulović (b. 1983, Podgorica, Montenegro) graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje, where he also received his M.A. degree in 2008. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Milčik Young Visual Artist Award (2017), the Grand Prix of the Herceg Novi Winter Art Salon (2016), and several awards at the Montenegrin Art Salon “13 November” for painting and video art. He represents Montenegro at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2026) with the project Out of the Blue, I’m Swept Away.

He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, residency programs, and international projects in New York, Vienna, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Madrid, Basel, Saint Petersburg, Regensburg, Tirana, and Belgrade.

His works are included in numerous public and private collections, including the October Salon Collection (Belgrade Cultural Centre), the Deutsche Telekom Collection, the National Museum of Montenegro Collection, the Museums and Galleries of Podgorica Collection, the University of Montenegro Collection, the Luciano Benetton Collection, the Federculture Rome Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro Collection, and the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts Collection.

 

Svetlana Racanović is an art historian, curator, and art critic. She earned her PhD in Transdisciplinary Studies of Contemporary Art and Media at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University in Belgrade.

Since 2018, she has been a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje. She has curated many exhibitions in Montenegro and abroad, including: : Out of the Blue, I’m Swept Away, 61st Venice Biennale (2026); I Want to See my Mountains, Cetinje (2025); The Lines of Flight (Budva, 2017); The Fridge Factory and Clear Waters, 54^th Venice Biennale (2011); Sweet, Little, Dirty Things, Artpoint Gallery (Vienna, 2010); The Eros of Slight Offence, 51^st Venice Biennale (2005); Montenegrin Beauty, Motorenhalle, Dresden and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2005); IV Cetinje Biennial of Contemporary Art (Cetinje, 2002); Chain of Discoveries (Montenegro, 2001); III Cetinje Biennial of Contemporary Art (Cetinje, 2001).

She is the recipient of the Lazar Trifunović Award for Art Criticism (2004). As a Fulbright scholar, she spent time in New York in 2014, as well as in artist residencies in New York in 2023 (Residency Unlimited) and Vienna in 2009 (KulturKontakt).

She has published the books: Marina Abramović – From Cuts to the Stitches (Geopoetika, Belgrade, 2019) and Millennium Bug?! – Montenegrin Art Scene around 2000: Delinquent Coalition of Critic and Practice (CSU, Podgorica, 2009). She has also published numerous texts in art monographs, exhibition catalogues, academic journals, and art publications in Montenegro and abroad.