Bittersweet

Group Exhibition
Curator: Amalija Stojsavljević

BITTERSWEET brings together five artists who explore early parenthood through embroidery, encaustic painting, comics, digital drawing, and textile. The exhibition challenges idealized images of motherhood and fatherhood, revealing the ambivalence between joy and exhaustion, intimacy and isolation. The works connect personal narratives with broader questions
of mental health, gender, identity, and the invisible labor of care.
Each artist develops a distinct visual language that reflects processes of adjustment, shiting roles, and the negotiation of social expectations. Alongside maternal voices, the exhibition includes a father’s perspective that redefines fatherhood by entering the sphere of daily, embodied care. In doing so, BITTERSWEET opens space for unsentimental and critical perspectives on parenthood that remain rare in contemporary visual culture.
The book Uterus Effects by Amalija Stojsavljević will be included in the exhibition display and made available to visitors, serving as a theoretical and visual supplement to the artworks.
Artwork on the poster: Vuk Palibrk
Poster design: Milena Gajić

Artists
Mia Arsenijević (RS)
Visual artist and Associate Professor at the University of Kragujevac. Her printed and hand-embroidered friezes weave childhood memories with present-day motherhood, using embroidery as both a symbol of women’s work and a tool for personal narrative.

Saša Bezjak (SI)
Multidisciplinary artist and art educator from Maribor. Her embroidery on everyday textiles maps familial relationships and microstructures of care from a feminist perspective.

Milena Gajić (RS/AT)
Digital and visual artist based in Vienna, currently pursuing doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. Her drawings interrogate the tension between motherhood, artistic identity, and the invisibility of domestic labor.

Vuk Palibrk (RS)
Illustrator, comic artist, and animator based in Belgrade. His black-and-white comics bring dry humor to the strains of early fatherhood, revealing its parallels with maternal experience.

Marija Todorović (RS/AT)
Visual artist and musician living in Vienna. Her encaustic paintings, developed through occupational therapy during severe postpartum depression, layer wax and pigment into abstract records of psychological states.

Curator
Amalija Stojsavljević (RS/AT)
Art historian, curator, and cultural worker based in Vienna, whose practice engages with otherness, reproductive labor, feminist artistic strategies, and outsider art. Her recent and upcoming project include the book Distaff: Contemporary Embroidery in the Former Yugoslav Countries (2025) and collaboration with the artistic team of TEATA, a new multilingual theatre in Vienna.