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  © Milica Živković, A Life A Flash, 2021, Courtesy of the artist