ROOM 0

 Duration of the exhibition: December 2 - December 28, 2025

Curator: Jelena Pavićević








The exhibition “ROOM 0” by artist Isidora Branković problematizes the body as a central instrument of analysis, resistance, and representation within socio-economic, class-based, and biopolitical relations. The artist treats the body as a site where institutional codes and social norms are inscribed, but also as a material entity capable of articulating fractures within the order that defines it. In this sense, “ROOM 0” exceeds the spatial definition of an exhibition and operates as a zero-degree space of subjectivation—a field in which identity is stratified through interaction with capitalist, post-Yugoslav, and neoliberal structures of power. The works in the exhibition performatively activate different modalities of subjective experience: exposure, burden, blockage, sensory deprivation, ritual transmission of voice, horizontal feminist cohesion, the crossing of professional and class boundaries, as well as mechanisms of humiliation and sexualization. These gestures do not function solely through narrative; rather, they act as micropolitical interventions that map overlapping regimes of visibility—what is recognized as art, what is registered as labor, and what remains invisible or depoliticized in everyday life. In Branković’s work, the body becomes an experimental Subject—a surface upon which inequalities are refracted, from nepotistic and class hierarchies to microaggressions and protocols of political representation. It functions both as an extension of the system that shapes it and as a form of resistance that contests its own objectification. In moments of excessive burden, sensory deprivation, observation, or silence, the body articulates the tension between imposed performativity and authorial intentionality, transforming personal experience into a tool for critical reflection on structures of power. The materiality of space—whether industrial ruins, dirt, earth, or the architecture of institutions of power—emerges as a geopolitics of memory: a layer of presence and absence that structures both collective and individual identity. Within such contexts, the body retains its vulnerability but also its subversive potential; even when silenced, it remains semiotically overdetermined, and its inability to speak becomes a form of speech in itself. Through collective performance and the use of multiple female voices, a concept of a feminist field is articulated—one that does not operate through hegemonic power, but through the resonant energy of shared breathing and the synchronization of presence. In this framework, the voice ceases to be a solitary expression and becomes a vibration that disrupts the privatization of emotion, opening a space in which intimacy acquires a political dimension. This practice constructs horizontal feminist technologies of presence, regeneration, and solidarity, while simultaneously deconstructing vertical hierarchies of power. The boundary between artistic and non-artistic labor is likewise destabilized. In one of the works, the artist exchanges roles with a café worker, suggesting that subjectivity does not strictly depend on profession, but rather on the dispositif of labor and visibility within the system: who is recognized, who is expendable, and who becomes surplus in representation. This epistemological rupture provides insight into how environments produce and withdraw meaning, while the process itself becomes a critical apparatus for analyzing social and institutional hierarchies. The exploitation of the female body and symbolic silencing function as extreme points of biopolitical surveillance. The artist does not present woman as a passive victim, but as a contaminated Subject of speech: a body that, by merely occupying space, generates resistance and articulates critique of both symbolic and material mechanisms of power. The project “ROOM 0” thus establishes an analytical horizon in which identity does not appear as a fixed category, but as a processual configuration emerging through the interaction of body, space, and system. The exhibition functions as a laboratory for rethinking the status of artistic labor within socially produced hierarchies, as well as a space that enables the transformation of the Subject—from an object of representation into an agent of revolt. Within this visual-theoretical space, the artist intertwines the intimate with the political, and the performative with the everyday. The exhibition “ROOM 0” represents a site where identity is deconstructed, reshaped, and rearticulated as a critical instance in relation to the structures that simultaneously form and constrain it. In this way, the work raises the question of the meaning of the body in space—its articulation and its position within an imposed system of values that defines visibility, control, and the legitimacy of the Subject, while at the same time shaping and limiting its possibilities for free expression.

Text by Jelena Pavićević, Art theorist and curator of the exhibition