Turning Points that close: what remains of MSUB's biggest exhibition

In one of the side rooms on the second floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, under the glass of a vitrine that looks modest compared with the monumental canvases in the main hall, stands a drawing by Sava Sumanovic, drawn in pencil on writing paper and labelled “Paris, February 1923”. The drawing shows a woman’s head; on the other side of the paper are three lines of what looks like a shop receipt, and in the corner is Sumanovic’s signed note “for food, 4 francs 50 centimes”. A visitor who stops in front of that vitrine for more than twenty seconds, an exception in retrospectives of this format, gets a miniature glimpse into how a painter who two decades later became part of the Serbian canon organised his day as a young student in Paris.

The exhibition Turning Points to Modernity: Art of Society 1900-1945, which closed its doors on 2 March 2026 after five months of continuous display, was the largest installation at MSUB since the museum’s reopening in 2017 following a ten-year reconstruction. With over four hundred works by one hundred and fifty authors, encompassing painting, sculpture, prints, applied art, photography and architectural sketches, the exhibition moved through half a century of the development of Serbian and Yugoslav art, from the appearance of Serbian Impressionism in Konjovic and Bijelic, through the inter-war Expressionist wave, to the socially engaged painting of the 1940s.

The exhibition was curated by a team of seven MSUB researchers, led by curator Dejan Vukovic, who said in public addresses at the opening that the preparation work had lasted four years, with access to the collections of twenty-eight institutions from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia. The central section, including Bijelic canvases from the 1930s, Konjovic canvases from his “black phase”, and a group of works by Sumanovic from his short Sid period in 1942 before he was executed by the Ustasha authorities, was the most consolidated presentation of these authors in a single space since the end of the Yugoslav period.

What this exhibition means in MSUB’s long-term plan

The five months of Turning Points brought MSUB one hundred and nineteen thousand visitors, twenty per cent above the planned target. Compared with the Sequences exhibition of 2019, which over the same period brought in eighty-three thousand visitors, or with Marina Abramovic: The Cleaner of 2022, which over a shorter period drew one hundred and thirty thousand, Turning Points sits in the middle but nonetheless successful zone of institutional results.

What the numbers do not measure is the long-term effect on curatorial work in the house. Turning Points was, in procedural terms, a pilot for the way MSUB plans to approach its next major retrospective installations, with a focus on international cooperation with institutions from the former Yugoslavia and an approach that uses multimedia elements, audio-visual stations and a digital archive in the same space as the original works. Vukovic, in the closing lecture he delivered on 1 March, said that this practice, standardised in international museum environments for some fifteen years, remains in Serbia in the phase of institutionalisation.

As for the catalogue edition, published in a run of two thousand copies in co-production with Clio publishing, eight hundred and thirty copies had been sold by the close of the exhibition at a price of twelve thousand dinars. That is a solid result for a specialist edition but also points to the structural problem of the Serbian art-book market, where catalogues of major exhibitions sell in small runs because the price is too high for the average museum visitor. MSUB in May announced the possibility of issuing a condensed catalogue edition at a lower price, although no concrete date has been given.

After Turning Points, the house turns to the next major installation, scheduled for autumn 2026, the result of cooperation with the Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon. According to the preliminary announcement, the exhibition will deal with the relationship between Eastern and Western European art of the 1990s, focusing on artistic practices that arose immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The exact opening date will be announced at the start of September, but the house expects the installation to run from mid-October to the end of February 2027.

What remains from Turning Points is therefore twofold: a programmatic success in visitor numbers and a structural lesson for future installations. MSUB’s permanent display, which in reduced scope includes works from the same era, remains accessible to visitors every day except Tuesday, at the standard ticket price of six hundred dinars.