The October Salon is the longest-running contemporary art exhibition in Serbia, founded in 1960 by the National Committee of the City of Belgrade as an annual review of the year's significant work in Serbian fine arts, opening each year on or around 20 October — the date of Belgrade's liberation from German occupation in 1944. The original framing was modelled, the organising institution's own historical statement records, on the nineteenth-century Paris salons: a juried annual showcase, with three equal money prizes awarded by an international jury, conceived as the institutional centre of the national art scene. The exhibition was expanded in 1967 to include applied as well as fine arts; an artistic director was introduced in 2001; and in 2004, by the City's decision and at the initiative of the long-standing organiser, the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the exhibition was reframed as an international event open to artists from across Europe and beyond.
The 2014 City of Belgrade decision converting the Salon from an annual to a biennial event — the institutional change that the present series is built on — was implemented across the 2014 and 2016 cycles, and from the 56th edition (2016) onward the exhibition has carried the parallel English-language designation Belgrade Biennale alongside its historic Serbian name. The 60th anniversary edition, held in October–December 2024, was the institutional moment at which the Cultural Centre of Belgrade chose to set aside the single-curator model that had organised every international edition since 2004, in favour of three parallel commissioned curatorial concepts presented simultaneously across the city's principal cultural venues.
The three commissioned concepts
The first of the three teams, working under the title Trace, was led by the Italian curator Lorenzo Balbi (director of MAMbo, the Museum of Modern Art of Bologna) in collaboration with the Serbian art historian and curator Dobrila Denegri. The second, Aesthetic(s) of Encounter(s), was the work of Matthieu Lelièvre (curator at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon) together with Maja Kolarić, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. The third, Hope is a Discipline, was developed by Lina Džuverović — senior lecturer and course leader of the MA Curating and Collections at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London — together with Emilia Epštajn and Ana Knežević, curators of the Museum of African Art in Belgrade.
The three concepts were distributed across nine Belgrade venues — the Cultural Centre of Belgrade's own gallery network at Knez Mihailova, the Pavilion at Cvetni Trg, the salon space of the Belgrade City Museum, the Gallery of the Faculty of Fine Arts, the former Akademija Club, the galleries of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS) and of the Union of Fine Artists of Yugoslavia (ULUPUDS), the Museum of African Art and the windows of the French Institute — and were accompanied by a month of readings, talks, performances and workshops in the city's public space. The overarching anniversary question — Šta ostaje?, what is left, what remains — was conceived to be answered three times in parallel rather than once, and was directed both at the institution's own six-decade record and at the wider condition of the international biennial circuit in the mid-2020s.
From Yugoslav state salon to European biennial
The structural feature that distinguishes the October Salon from the other principal post-Yugoslav biennial institutions — Manifesta's 2010 Murcia–Cartagena edition and its 2014 St Petersburg edition aside, the Belgrade institution is the only continuing exhibition in the former Yugoslav space with an unbroken six-decade institutional record — is the long internal transition by which a socialist-era annual review of Serbian fine arts became, across the 2000s and 2010s, an international biennial of contemporary art on the European model. The 45th edition in 2004, curated by the Polish critic Anda Rottenberg under the title Continental Breakfast, was the institutional inflection point: the first edition with an international curator and the first to programme work by non-Serbian artists as the body of the exhibition rather than as guest contributions to a national review. The German curator René Block (with Barbara Heinrich) followed in 2006, the Hungarian-Austrian curator Lóránd Hegyi in 2007, and the Belgrade-born, Berlin-based critic Bojana Pejić in 2008, with Artist-Citizen — the edition that established the political-criticism vocabulary the institution has worked from since.
