ICI Belgrade
January 23 - March 7, 2026
DOTS Gallery
Conceived as a traveling project with three initial stops—Berlin, Vilnius, and Valletta—and developed in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institutes, the project has progressively expanded beyond its original boundaries, driven by the strength of its themes and the significant international interest it has generated.
Belgrade represents the first venue of this expansion. Hosted at DOTS Gallery, the project enters into dialogue with a context profoundly shaped by historical transformations, redefinitions of borders, and processes of reconstruction. The city thus becomes a cultural laboratory for investigating the relationship between past and present, and for observing how individual and collective identities are formed through continuous crossings.
Site-specific
For the Belgrade stage, several artists are presenting site-specific works. In addition to the original masks used in the video work The Fox and The Wolf: Struggle for Power (Farnesina Collection), Elena Bellantoni is exhibiting a selection of video works created in 2019 as part of the On the Breadline project, which was developed in Belgrade, Istanbul, Athens, and Palermo. The videos, presented on old cathode-ray tube monitors, form a single sculptural body, in which the moving image becomes matter and physical presence. From one of the monitors, which displays the video Blue White Red and stands apart from the others, a series of colored ribbons radiate out, evoking the colors of the Serbian flag. In this work, the body becomes a political and symbolic space, drawing on the tension between the myth of the strong leader and the complexity of historical and social reality.
The poem Si chiama Guerra (2003) by Tomaso Binga, presented as an installation with sound, intertwines body, language, and politics, presenting itself as an act of poetic resistance. In a country that has experienced occupations, divisions, and rebirths, Binga’s voice resonates as an invitation to rediscover vulnerability as a generative force and as an essential condition for new forms of coexistence and rootedness.
Finally, Agnese Purgatorio, in continuity with the works in the collection and in particular Perhaps you can write to me, whose title is inspired by the poetic universe of Emily Dickinson, creates an installation centered on a large mailbox, a device for connection and anticipation. Displayed on its surfaces are a series of postcards depicting images of water—the Danube and the Drina—intersected by two poetic phrases, in different formal registers, handwritten by the artist.
AGNESE PURGATORIO
Iz Daleka (From a Distance)
The mailbox bears two poetic inscriptions: “Only from afar does everything shine like a star” by Desanka Maksimović, and “What murky water cannot wash away,” from Ivo Andrić. Through this poetic gesture, the artist invites the public to choose one of the two phrases and write their impressions on the back of the image, thereby initiating a transition from contemplation to action and connection.
ELENA BELLANTONI
On the Breadline, 2019 (selection of works)
The videos form a single sculptural entity, in which the moving image becomes matter and a physical presence. A series of colored ribbons radiate from one of the monitors, which displays the video Blue White Red, filmed in Novi Beograd. The monitor, isolated from the others, becomes the point of origin for a spatial intervention that evokes the colors of the Serbian flag and, at the same time, those of the former Yugoslavia.
TOMASO BINGA
Si chiama Guerra, 2003
The visual poem Si chiama Guerra (2003) is an exercise in phonetic play and semantic shifts (gara / tara / bara, words that in italian mean: race, tare, coffin), depicting war as a destructive competition that weighs heavily on the earth and on bodies. Language, distorted and wounded, becomes a tool for denouncing propaganda, violence, and power. Writing here is a political act: an invitation to rewrite the world against war.