A City of Things

Maja Cirić

The dialectic of scale and substance animates Jovan’s current exhibition, staged within the aging skeleton of a hundred-year-old domestic structure in Belgrade. Salvaged wooden fragments, not arbitrary relics, but the very supportive limbs of bourgeois furniture, components rendered essential yet invisible and fragile within their original domestic constellation, are entombed in raw concrete and finished to simulate the stony heft of granite. This transubstantiation does not bury their domestic past so much as amplify a structural monumentality incongruous with their humble provenance. Encased and yet partially swathed in off-white tissue, the objects oscillate between emancipated architectural mass and abject fragility, a tension induced by their newfound autonomy.

By eschewing the plinth and distributing these hybrid forms directly onto the worn grounds, Jovan short-circuits the traditional scopic regime of the white cube. The arrangement evokes an urban grid, yet its reduced, almost toy-like scale renders the metropolis a precariously fragile model, a Lilliputian landscape that demilitarizes spatial dominance. This is a city not of authoritarian planning, but of things; each is bestowed with ironically grandiloquent titles (“Airbnb Room, Third Floor”), conflating the banality of contemporary transient lodging with the geological permanence of granite and concrete. The poetics here are expressly materialist, coaxing new meaning not from representation, but from the ontological wobble of size and substance.

The same reversible logic, the methodical inversion of function, scale, and material, pervades “Denim-Pilgrim” (2025). For this piece, a pair of jeans became an indexical instrument, subjected to an eleven-hour perambulation across Berlin, from sunrise in the east to dusk in the west. Dragged along the city’s asphalt and dirt, the denim absorbed the grit, friction, and entropy of the urban terrain, functioning as a singular, corporeal register of the walk. Its scanned residue, transposed onto canvas via a painstaking transfer process, brushing away paper to reveal the print beneath, transforms clothing into cartography. The labor of revelation formally echoes the pedestrian’s own attritional rhythm, rendering the garment a palimpsest of endurance and the city of Berlin itself an imprintable surface.

Across the installation, Jovan wields reversibility as his primary apparatus: a shift in scale that renders the domestic architectural; a change in function that elevates a garment to a witness; an alteration of material that grants concrete the semblance of granite while denim takes on the weight of archival record. This strategic instability courts the poetics posited by new materialism, not as mere philosophical alibi, but as a phenomenological confrontation. In this terrain, the inferior asserts its monumentality, the intimate commands the public sphere, and the viewer, navigating this fragile domestic grid, is left to reconsider the very ontology of the everyday.