Barbara Knežević is an artist based in Dublin with Australian, Polish and Serbian heritage. She has an enduring interest in the historical, semiotic and political functions of objects, investigating their economies and hierarchies, as well as materialising and spatialising the belief systems embedded in them. In addition, she utilises sculptural form and moving image to explore how processes of diaspora shape history and society.
This exhibition features a film that explores the Iron Gates region, a scenic gorge on the Danube River, situated on the border between Serbia and Romania. Specifically, it considers the Iron Gates dam, built in 1964 as a collaborative initiative between the governments of the former Yugoslavia and Romania, and the Mesolithic sculptures of Lepenski Vir, discovered during the construction of this infrastructure. These works are an example of the earliest European monumental sculptural traditions and, arguably, a manifestation of a civilisation structured by matriliny. The film oscillates between fact and fiction, utilising montage as a device to retrace experiences of displacement, the culture of making, sculpture, and the natural world along the Danube River.
The film is composed of original footage captured in Donji Milanovac, Kladovo, and Belgrade, which consists of testimonies, staged imaginings, and choreographies. The narrative gives expression to nonhuman, material, infrastructural, animal, and geological actors of the Iron Gates dam. The characters are one of the Mesolithic sculptures of Lepenski Vir (Water Fairy), the mountain (Treskavac), the river (Danube), the fish (Moruna) and the Iron Gates dam (Đerdap). They are presented from a first-person perspective and materialise through voiceover, describing their relationships to one another in a polyphonic arrangement.
The film is also composed of archival footage associated with the construction of the Iron Gates dam by the Yugoslav and Romanian governments. It includes former Yugoslav president, Josip Broz Tito, and ordinary citizens of both Yugoslavia and Romania. These images provide a political context and help the narrative navigate temporal shifts.
The exhibition also features a selection of sculptures related to the film’s themes, including cyclicality, collectivity, and spirituality. They are composed of materials that the artist processed by hand: she fabricated elements drawn from industry, such as welded chain, mesh, and steel, alongside intimate, domestic items like ceramic, stone, and wood. They evoke the whirlpools found in this area of the Danube River, as well as the Iron Gate dam’s turbines.
The exhibition tells a multifaceted, selective trajectory of human and artistic evolution. It weaves historical and speculative chapters that consider societal changes in the Balkans, while also proposing new, alternative notions of progress. In parallel, it locates the artist’s Yugoslav identity explicitly in an era defined by global migration, in which subjectivity is shared widely. In this way, the exhibition addresses the politics of origin stories, fragmenting and questioning them through both collective memory and individual, personal circumstances.
The production of Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates) was funded by the Arts Council through a Project Award, with additional commissioning support provided by Solstice Arts Centre and the National Sculpture Factory. Its presentation at RCC is curated by Rayne Booth as part of a tour produced by Booth with funding provided by the Arts Council through the Touring of Work Scheme.
