Mangelos Award Turns 25, One Work From Every Winner
The exhibition '25 Years of the Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos Award' opens September 4 at the Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery and Akademija Club, showing one work by each of the award's winners.
More than 860 applications, 94 finished works, and close to 2,000 people who passed through the process as candidates, finalists, jury members, curators or critics. Reduced to numbers, that is the balance sheet of 25 years of the Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos Award. Starting September 4, that balance sheet appears for the first time as an exhibition, with one work from every winner, at two addresses in downtown Belgrade.
The exhibition “25 Years of the Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos Award” will be open to the public from September 4 to 30, at the Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery and at Akademija Club on Knez Mihailova Street. The curators are Ivana Basicevic Antic and Miroslav Karic.
“The aim of the exhibition and of marking the award’s anniversary is, above all, to point to the legacy this award has left on our art scene,” the organizers state in the announcement.
That phrasing undersells what the exhibition actually is. A retrospective of an award usually means a display case of certificates and a timeline on the wall. Here the curators chose the harder path, because what’s on show isn’t the award itself but what it left behind.
One Work Each, Twenty-Five Points
The curatorial key is simple, and risky for that very reason: every winner gets one spot in the space, regardless of whether their work is a video, a photograph, an installation or a site-specific intervention.
“The exhibition will present one work by every winner, as twenty-five points that, taken together, trace the map of a scene in constant self-examination,” the exhibition announcement states.
The announced list of artists includes Vladimir Nikolic, Milica Ruzicic, Milena Putnik, Sinisa Ilic, Katarina Zdjelar, Ivan Petrovic, Ivana Smiljanic, Dusica Drazic, Marina Markovic, Slobodan Stosic, Sasa Tkacenko, Natasa Kokic, Marko Markovic, Nina Simonovic, Jelena Mijic, Nadezda Kircanski, Katarina Petrovic, Zarko Aleksic, Jelena Micic, Pavle Banovic, Sanja Andjelkovic, Igor Siler, Nemanja Milenkovic and Jovana Blagojevic.
Read in order, that list is a chronology of the domestic art scene since 2002, and one written before anyone knew how things would turn out. The award goes to artists under 35, meaning at a point when judgment about someone’s work is still a bet, not a confirmation.
Who Is Behind the Award
The award was established in 2002 by the Center for Contemporary Art in Belgrade and the New York based Foundation for Civil Society. It is named after Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos, an artist and art historian regarded as the founding figure of conceptual art practice in the former Yugoslavia. The choice of name was not decorative: Mangelos’s own work was itself an argument with the art institution, so the award carried that obligation from the start.
Since 2010, the program has been run by Remont, an independent art association from Belgrade, and the Ilija and Mangelos Foundation from Novi Sad. The award is part of the international Young Visual Artists Awards network, which the New York foundation launched in the 1990s to support young artists from Central Europe and the Balkans. The makeup of the jury over the years says something too: its members have included an assistant director of MoMA in New York and an associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum.
What Does a Winner Actually Get?
Not a check, but time and a place. The winner goes on an eight week residency and studio stay at Residency Unlimited in New York, with a chance to network with figures from the local and international scene. After returning, there’s a presentation of the residency, followed by a solo show or the production of a new work. Since 2024, finalists too get months of mentoring from established contemporary visual art professionals, aimed at developing and producing work for the closing exhibition.
The criteria, as stated in the announcement, have not changed since the beginning:
“The Mangelos Award is given to artists under 35 years of age for distinctive, exceptional artistic work sustained over time, one that reflects a rounded critical and aesthetic outlook,” the organizers state.
The phrase “sustained over time” is doing most of the work here. It rules out a single successful project and instead demands something that is hardest to keep up in local conditions: work that outlasts one season and one competition.
Numbers That Speak to the Program, Not the Ceremony
The ratio between more than 860 applications and 94 produced works is actually the most interesting figure in the whole anniversary. An award that was only a title wouldn’t have production statistics. This one does, which means that for a quarter of a century the money went into making work as well, not just into handing out a title. The annual finalists’ exhibition, produced alongside the award itself, has for decades been one of the few places where the current state of the scene could be seen all in one place.
The September exhibition carries an obligation that no curatorial text can solve. Twenty-five works made over a span of 25 years, in different mediums and under different production conditions, have to function as a single whole across two spaces, not as 25 parallel mini exhibitions that share only a common occasion. If that works, we get a cross-section of the scene. If it doesn’t, we still get the most complete archive of this award we’ve ever had, and that alone is no small thing.
