In collaboration with Serbian-based Gallery Blok
Curated by Snežana Saraswati Petrović, Ismael de Anda III, Arezoo Bharthania, David Leapman, Sijia Chen
Artists: Ismael de Anda III & Eugene Ahn, Djordje Arnaut, Carlos Beltrán Aréchiga, Arezoo Bharthania, Rigo Bonilla, Sijia Chen, Baha Danesh, Takeshi Kanemura, David Leapman, Aleksandar Slivnjak Lortek, Zeljka Momirov, Snežana Saraswati Petrović, Max Presneill, Nikola Radosavljević, Vojislav Radovanović, Stephanie Sherwood
Durden and Ray presents the next iteration of Translocal Conclave: Gathering Sites of Memory, a project that began as an exchange between Gallery Blok in Belgrade and Durden and Ray in Los Angeles, creating a dialogue across distinct cultural and geographic contexts. Rooted in the idea of decentralization, the project proposes that meaningful artistic exchange emerges not from established cultural centers but from places where everyday life unfolds.
A conclave is traditionally understood as a focused gathering. Here, it unfolds in the marketplace—an open civic space where migration, commerce, memory, and everyday life intersect. Both Gallery Blok in Belgrade’s historic market district and Durden and Ray in the Bendix Building within Downtown Los Angeles’s Fashion District are rooted in vibrant urban marketplaces, where daily exchange becomes a site of artistic encounter. Rather than seeking consensus, the exhibition embraces distinction, bringing together artists from Serbia and Los Angeles to explore displacement, personal reinvention, belonging, and the continual reconstruction of home and becoming.
This second chapter turns toward home as both memory and process. It brings together artists from Los Angeles and Serbia whose lives have been shaped by migration, displacement, personal expansion, and layered cultural identities. Alongside artists from Serbia—including those whose lives were transformed by war and relocation—the exhibition includes Los Angeles artists who are immigrants, descendants of immigrant families, and artists of plural Indigenous heritages, reflecting the city’s cultural diversity and its history as a city of arrivals and dynamic evolution. Together, their experiences reveal how memory, identity, belonging, and regeneration are continually negotiated and redefined across generations, imposed boundaries, and urban landscapes.
