Solo Exhibition: Word and Thought. The Big Abstract Painting, 2026

Artist: Irena Lagator Pejović

Curator: Branislav Dimitrijević

The interactive installation presents books from the publishing house Rad, founded in 1949 in socialist Yugoslavia. Producing manuals for postwar reconstruction through the Workers’ University, the publishing house developed into one of the most prestigious in the region. Its series Reč i misao (Word and Thought), launched in 1959, was the first accessible pocket-format collection to democratise access to Yugoslav and world literature through mass circulation. In the contemporary world, this edition communicates the material traces of a shared cultural heritage.

The books, available to the public for reading, form a monochromatic surface with their uniform red covers that recalls an abstract painting, collapsing the distinctions between high art and mass culture. Foregrounding literature as art and the quality of translation as essential postwar infrastructure, the installation critically interrogates the neoliberal market logic of contemporary art, proposing an alternative: art as a collective resource that embodies care, plurality, equality, and accessibility as means of representation.

The work is installed in the deconsecrated basilica of Santa Maria in Punta, dating from the ninth century, as part of the jubilee edition of the Theatre City Budva festival. At a moment when libraries are being bombed, universities shuttered, and access to knowledge is becoming a privilege, to pick up a book and read it in a public space becomes a political gesture. These books, pages that crossed the boundaries of language, geography, and class, were intended for everyone. It is precisely this accessibility that today sounds like a radical demand in a world where knowledge is increasingly treated as a commodity rather than a right.

The book is a space of personal and collective memory. Through translations from more than twenty languages, Reč i misao served as an infrastructure of free speech before that term became a political phrase. Today, as that access narrows, the everyday object of the book acquires a dimension of urgency, becoming at once poetic and political: a space of hope, care, and critical reflection. The book connects generations, and it is within that connection that the possibility of critical resistance to the contemporary colonisation of our perception is to be found. In a time when images are produced faster than they can be understood, the capacity to create an image from thought becomes one of the most essential forms of freedom.

Irena Lagator Pejović is an artist and art theorist whose post-media and post-conceptual practice operates at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory, and ecocritical inquiry. Her work investigates the destructive mechanisms of the neoliberal order, the erasure of architectural heritage, the commodification of public space, and the colonisation of perception. Central to her practice is an engagement with ecology and the effects of climate change, examined through the lens of Félix Guattari’s ecosophy and its three inseparable registers: the environmental, the social, and the subjective. She has been active on the international contemporary art scene since 2000. She is Associate Professor at the University of Donja Gorica in Podgorica. She represented Montenegro with a solo exhibition at the 55th Biennale di Venezia (2013). Her work has been shown at institutions including the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, MG+MSUM in Ljubljana, MAXXI Museum in Rome, La Triennale di Milano, Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, the Istanbul Biennial, White Box Art Center in New York, and Salzburger Kunstverein, among others. Among numerous awards, she is a recipient of the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts at the 4^th Cetinje biennial  and the award of the 24^th Nadežda Petrović Memorial. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including FRAC Marseille, Villa Pacchiani in Santa Croce sull’Arno, MoCA Belgrade, and MoCA Montenegro, Podgorica. Together with Natalija Vujošević, she co-directs the Cetinje Biennials Archive project (ISU+FPNJ).

www.irenalagator.net

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