My artistic practice mostly develops through long-term research frameworks that materialize in various formats. The starting point is often anecdotal, a matter of circumstance, or it comes from the gathering of discarded everyday, or consumable materials.
In relation to different starting points and referring to the structures I wish to examine, I currently employ three conceptual categories: Who is Adrian Lister?, Exhibiting Otherwise, and Archiving Artistic Anxieties.
Adrian Lister emerged in 2013 as a (mistranslated) version of my name via Google Translate. This coincided with my move to Belgium, where Adrian Lister became a tool for translating diverse contexts and conditions shaping my practice. What began as a joke evolved into a serious inquiry into the instability of identity, language, and artistic practice. This project reflects my interest in migration, where artistic activity becomes a space to question and contextualize social and cultural roles, as well as modes of work. Who is Adrian Lister? materializes through writing, speech performances, installations, workshops, collective readings, and self-published books.
My continued education in Belgium coincided with my involvement in technical teams producing museum exhibitions. In response to the scale of production and the relationships forged within it, works like The Great Wall and The Stones That Were Almost Exhibited in a Museum emerged. Here, I grant artistic status to materials I was tasked with removing as waste in my role as a technician.
Seeking alternative modes of production within art institutions, I began exploring the field of artistic research as a potential counter to market-driven art production.
In late 2016, I started developing a concept of Exhibiting Otherwise, provoked by the (self-)imposed pressure of success in art and the recognition that certain practices are rendered powerless within dominant production models. From this anxious position, Exhibiting Otherwise reimagines the exhibition – visual art’s leading format – by questioning boundaries between making, mediation, and presentation. It proposes examining the porosity and elasticity of exhibition practice, highlighting habits, protocols, roles, administrative and financial concerns, and shifting toward the performative. The focus lies on the temporal aspect of exhibiting.
My solo exhibition Razstava (2017) at the Center for Contemporary Art of Montenegro reframed the Slovenian word razstava (exhibition) to evoke disassembly and taking-apart. The exhibition, produced by my mother in collaboration with a local cake company, mirrored individual initiatives and the support networks of family and friends that underpin the cultural production, consequently showing the lack of institutional support for contemporary art in Montenegro.
Shifts and disruptions within (self-)institutionalized structures entail instability, uncertainty, and doubt—what I term artistic anxieties. Anxiety, as a deeply personal unease, acts as a signal rather than a defined emotion. Though subjective, it points to shared incapacities within artistic labor. In his essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” Timothy Gould interprets Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the thing with feathers”, comparing hope’s symptoms to post-traumatic stress disorder, with the crucial difference that hope’s absent cause lies in the future, not the past. Similarly, engaging with artistic anxieties became a form of hope for collective resistance.
To explore these concepts, I repurposed take-away materials from exhibitions and art events I attended over the years. These ephemeral objects became references and catalysts for speech performances and publications, and they were developed collectively within the program of a.pass in Brussels.
Performativity and relational approaches to exhibition practice became central. Writing, always present in my work, now becomes a method of researching. I write texts meant to be read aloud in exhibition spaces, attempting to grasp and reflect feelings of dislocation and fragmentation in creation and thought. These texts address foreignness, alienation, and relationality, implying that the positions we occupy are never fully resolved or consensual.
This led to 7 Anxieties and the World, an artistic publication—a deck of reading cards, which is from this perspective a crucial work for how my practice will evolve. As an object, performance, and research methodology, it creates conditions to negotiate the role of the artist within art institutions.
“Reading from the deck becomes a research tool for the artist to build an archive of (artistic) anxieties. The cards display material remnants of others’ artworks, collected and reinterpreted through Gvozdenović’s personal relationship to them. In individual sessions, the artist ‘reads’ the deck for participants, framing this performative interaction as a conversation about anxieties tied to creative labor, authorship, and exhibition. This approach to gathering materials can be described as anarchival, deliberately evading classical archival methods through artistic research.” (Hana Sirovica, Tjeskobe performansa u svijetu umjetnosti)
By foregrounding affective and emotional dimensions of knowledge production, I collaborate with peers to develop hybrid formats like Nail Art Affects Theory (performance/study group/manicure), Contingent Weirdness – Turn Your Research into Horror (workshop/installation/performance), and Between Anxiety and Hope (publishing/home-craft). Alongside readings on artistic anxieties, these formats create environments for collective learning and engagement with artistic processes through doubt, uncertainty, and fear.
During and post-pandemic, I developed projects addressing human-nature relations (Anthropomorphic Trouble, Water Made to Move, Ecological State Declaration from a Parallel Universe). A relational approach to art and experimental pedagogical methodologies position all relationships, also beyond art-making, as sites of artistic activity. The landscape becomes a meeting ground where personal and collective histories and futures intertwine. This relationship is acknowledged as ‘trouble’ and explored through continuous shifts between intimacy and alienation, forging dynamic connections resistant to simplification.
The emphasis lies on interdependence rather than confrontation, proposing fragile, unstable spaces as sites of both hope and critical engagement.