Exhibition:
"THE ROOTS OF SMALL FIRES"
Milica Živković 

26.02.26 – 31.05.2026 
MQ Freiraum

In her first institutional solo exhibition in Vienna, Milica Živković presents a large-scale installation of new works. The artist has been exploring motifs from The Roots of Small Fires for several years, but here they are brought into a new phase of her artistic practice.

Živković’s works emerge from the complex interplay of personal experience and the political reality of the post-war Balkans. She returned to her hometown of Belgrade after years of family migration and study abroad. As a child, she witnessed the bombing of the city – today, the Serbian capital is marked by civil society resistance and massive anti-corruption protests.

Several motifs in the installation featured here make abstract reference to the experience of returning to a place associated with ambivalent feelings, yet also with resilience. The shimmering silver fabrics used as a canvas allude to the pompous aesthetics of turbo-folk. This musical style, often associated with nationalism and the Yugoslav Wars, forms a kind of background noise to Živković’s childhood memories. The fabrics feature abstract, root-like forms that evoke gestures of entrenchment and uprooting. Rather than remaining flat and confined within a defined frame in the conventional manner, the paintings on these fabrics expand into their surroundings – like roots that do not cling intractably to the ground, but strive forward. While these elements appeared in earlier works by the artist, the version presented here features metal components that also extend the painting into three dimensions. Like a kind of defensive overlay, the metal applications seem to hold the memories in check, yet they appear just as fragile and fragmented as the memories themselves.

The element that binds together the entire installation is the light that refracts off the surfaces of the paintings and lamp sculptures. The light of the ‘small fires’ in the title appears as a reflection of many small focal points – symbolic of a region, and a world, in turmoil. The lamps scattered throughout the room carry both personal and societal meanings. In Živković's mother tongue, ‘looking like a lamp’ is a derogatory metaphor for a woman who is seen as overly dolled up and degraded to an object of desire. The artist appropriates this expression and contrasts it with a tender memory: in the years after the war, as a child, she helped her father cut metal bases for lamps.

In The Roots of Small Fires, visitors move across a stage of remembrance, a place on the threshold between past and future – an interplay of light and the absence of light.

This exhibition is realised as part of the UNIQA SEE FUTURE Foundation: Mentorship Program for Visual Artists, in collaboration with with the artist and mentor Šejla Kamerić , Nomad — Croatian Office for Contemporary Art, Nomarts — Kunstverein zur Schaffung von Kunstsammlungen and MuseumsQuartier Wien. Most of the works on display were created during Milica Živković’s two-month stint as MQ Artist-in-Residence in Vienna.

Born in Belgrade in 1993, Milica Živković is a multidisciplinary artist. She studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje and completed her master's degree at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in 2020. Her work is influenced by experiences in the post-Yugoslav region, family migration, questions of memory politics and a female perspective. Živković has held exhibitions in several European cities and the United States. In 2023, she received the Milčik Prize for young contemporary artists. She lives and works in Belgrade.

Image © MuseumsQuartier, photo: Simon Veres

Artist Statement:

There is a shape that keeps returning to me - a claw, a flare, a flicker of light breaking through something dark. I have painted these shapes obsessively on shiny fabrics - synthetic silk, organza and iridescent artificial satin, that once belonged to the world of turbo-folk: the background noise of my childhood, that strange theatre of glitter and decay. Those fabrics shimmer like the nights in my hometown; wounded, ecstatic, pretending to be eternal. I think I paint them to understand what beauty means in a place that has seen too much of it, too easily, within the context that was very often everything but beautiful.
The shape first came to me as a wound, a small rebellion against the inside noise, and now it began to grow roots. Not roots that settle, but ones that wander. They stretch through metal, through paper and fabrics, through the faint memory of making things by hand when there was nothing else to do but survive. These forms reappear across paintings and objects, each time carrying new traces—scratches, seams, and layered gestures that echo the persistence of memory. With each new series of these objects and paintings comes new re-interpretation.
When I returned home after years of migrations, my hometown seemed heavier, as if its bones had turned to glass, metal and dust. Corruption had found its rhythm, and the spectacle was no longer pretending to be temporary. The past was everywhere, seductive, broken and familiar. I began to see the same root, the same claw, in the streets, in the gestures of people waiting for something unnamed to finally be resolved.
And there comes the lamp. Which, for me, represents a body that remembers.
In Balkan slang, to say a woman “looks like a lamp” is to objectify her beauty.  I took that phrase and made it mine because it exposes the same distorted values my work confronts. I build lamps that hold the same paper shades from my childhood, but their stands now twist and turn into root-like forms, half organic, half industrial. They are remnants of both tenderness and resistance. They remember the factories, the hands of my father, the dust of metal, and the quiet laughter of trying to make something shine in the darkness.
In these new series, paintings mimic that transformation: monochrome gestures on shiny fabric, the same material worn by turbo-folk singers, representing a glittering backdrop to a society in collapse. They hold the tension between surface and depth, between the shine of spectacle and the dull ache of what lies beneath. I think of them as small altars to contradiction, to the way light can come from exhaustion, and how pain, when it finally roots itself, can grow into something luminous.

In the MQ Freiraum space, I imagine these works breathe in the light. The fabrics shift as the viewer moves, the lamps cast intimate and uneven shadows, and the gallery becomes a kind of stage for remembering. What was once private becomes spatial, a sort of dialogue between reflection and residue.
I no longer separate the personal from the political. They share the same pulse, the same soil. My work is that soil, tangled, reflective, and quietly alive. It begins with the claw, the claw transforms into the root, the leaf, the lamp; and ends somewhere between collapse and grace, where memory stops being history and finally overcomes it.