CRITICS HAVE CHOOSEN 2026: It’s only the end of the world
Curated by: Sofija Milenković
Artists: Marija Avramović and Sam Twidale; Pavle Banović and Jelena Nikolić, Jakub Daněk, Lidija Delić, Iva Kuzmanović, Tamara Spalajković, Jakub Daněk and Daniel Rajmon
The author of the 2026 edition of the traditional annual exhibition Critics Have Chosen – critics’ reception of contemporary visual art, continuously presented at the Art Gallery since 1967, is the art historian Sofija Milenković, the winner of the Lazar Trifunović Award for 2020.
The exhibition It’s Only the End of the World brings together artists connected by an interest in speculating on worlds that represent a discontinuity with the realm of our empirical experience and/or in exploring potential scenarios of the near or distant future. Developed within a methodological framework shaped by notions of science fiction, worldbuilding, and speculation, their works construct various alternative realities and worlds (of the future), most often envisioned as dystopias oriented toward some form of collapse or emerging as the result of its aftermath. Even when they take the form of a symbiotic utopia, their point of departure lies in some of the urgent issues of our present, such as the relationship between the human and the non-human, the dysfunctionality of dominant systems, and the omnipresence of technology. While drawing our attention to these problems and encouraging reflection on their causes and consequences and their systemic and structural interconnectedness, as well as their potential solutions, the works brought together in this exhibition also open up a space for reflecting on the ambivalent relationship we have toward them and the place they occupy in our everyday lives.
Sofija Milenković is a research assistant at the Institute for Art History, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of History of Art of the same Faculty, where she completed her bachelor’s and master’s studies. She also completed her master’s studies in art history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, as a recipient of a French Government scholarship. Her research focuses on modern art, transnational art history, and artistic connections between Belgrade and Paris. She is the author of scholarly and professional papers, exhibition texts, and reviews. She is a collaborator in the project Chronology of Exhibiting Sculpture in Serbia 1945–2000. She has received the “Lazar Trifunović” Award (2020).
The article “It’s only the end of the world” by Sofija Milenković can be read HERE.