To open the exhibition, join Barbara Knežević as she discusses her artistic practice and the themes informing the sculpture and film work in Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates) that place sculpture and personal and family experiences against the backdrop of larger historical narratives of the Danube and the Balkans.

The Iron Gates is an exhibition of new sculpture and film work by Barbara Knežević commissioned by Solstice Arts Centre and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. The exhibition is a series of sculptural objects and a single-channel film that interprets the history, stories, materiality, and the development of technology in the Iron Gates (Gvozdena kapije) region, a deep scenic gorge at Đerdap on the Dunav (Danube) River on the border of Serbia and Romania. It is also the name of the nearby Iron Gate I Hydroelectric dam completed in 1972 as a collaborative project between the governments of the former Yugoslavia and Romania. The series of large scale sculptures in the exhibition implement the language of monuments and temporality. They are composed of industrial materials that are then handmade, welded chain, mesh and steel are formed and fabricated alongside intimate, domestic materials such as ceramics, fabric, stone and wood. Sculptures are shown alongside and feature as actors in a single-channel film of the same title, that the artist describes as a ‘sculptural film’.

The Iron Gates film opens by honing in on the 10,000 year old sculptures of Lepenski Vir, the first monumental sculptures of Europe, discovered on the banks for the Dunav during preparatory work for the construction of the Iron Gates Dam. The narrative of the film gives voice to four further non-human, material, infrastructural, animal and geological actors of the Iron Gates gorge.  Composed of original footage captured in Donji Milanovac, Kladovo and Belgrade, personal testimonies, interviews, staged imaginings, choreography and archival footage the film gathers pace and oscillates between fact and speculative fiction,  using montage as a device to retrace stories of displacement, migration, the culture of making, sculpture and the natural world on the Dunav. Weaving historical and speculative chapters, the film and sculptures tell a fragmented, selective history of human development and origin stories, navigating geopolitical shifts in the region and critiquing and proposing alternative notions of progress. Gvozdene Kapije locates Knežević’s diasporic Yugoslav and Polish subject-hood explicitly in her work for the first time. The Iron Gates film and the materiality of the sculptures set the artist’s smaller family stories against the backdrop of larger historical narratives of the Dunav and the Balkans.

The Iron Gates (Gvozdene Kapije) will open at Solstice Arts Centre and tour to three further Irish venues, Sirius Arts Centre, Regional Cultural Centre and Wexford Art Centre with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland Touring Award.