Gvozdene Kapije / The Iron Gates brings together film and sculpture by artist Barbara Knežević, whose practice explores the politics of origin stories, material culture and the ways objects become entangled in narratives of identity, migration and nationhood. In this project, Knežević locates her diasporic Yugoslav heritage explicitly within her work for the first time, placing personal and family histories alongside the wider historical and geopolitical narratives of the Danube and the Balkans.

Originally commissioned by Solstice Arts Centre and curated by Rayne Booth, the exhibition centres on a newly commissioned forty-six-minute single-channel film and a series of large-scale sculptures responding to the Gvozdene Kapije (Iron Gates) region – a dramatic gorge along the Danube River forming the border between Serbia and Romania. The works engage with the layered histories, material cultures and technological transformations of the area, particularly the construction of the Iron Gates hydroelectric dam, a major infrastructural project developed by the governments of the former Yugoslavia and Romania during the 1960s.

At the heart of the film are the Mesolithic sculptures of Lepenski Vir, widely regarded as some of the earliest monumental sculptures in Europe, discovered during preparatory works for the dam. The narrative unfolds through a series of non-human narrators – material, infrastructural, animal and geological actors – whose voices trace the complex relationships between landscape, technology and human history. Combining original footage, archival material, interviews, choreography and staged sequences, the film moves between documentary and speculative fiction to explore stories of displacement, migration and the long culture of making along the Danube.

Alongside the film, Knežević presents a group of sculptures fabricated from industrial materials such as welded chain, mesh and steel, combined with domestic materials including ceramics, fabric, stone and wood. These works appear both as sculptural objects and as participants within what the artist describes as a “sculptural film,” where objects hold narrative presence. Together, the film and sculptures propose a fragmented account of human development, landscape transformation and the shifting meanings of progress.