MARIJA MANDIĆ

WHITE BEE

OPENING: 4. 6. 2025 AT 7 PM
EXHIBITION: 5. 6. – 26. 7. 2025

Serbian photographer Marija Mandić works primarily with photography, but also incorporates texts, drawings, and found materials into her practice. Her work explores questions of the past and memory, often through the lens of familial relationships. In her visually poetic project White Bee, she delves into themes of memory, female identity, and family ties. She constructs a genealogical tree whose roots reach—perhaps unexpectedly—to a female forebear, a primeval mother figure that holds a special place in Serbian culture, unlike in the Czech context.

“In Serbian tradition, this archetype of the mother, the earliest known female ancestor, is called bela pčela (eng. translation a white bee). Not much is clear about the term, especially since it’s so rare to even find a family tree that acknowledges women. However, this mythical mother is believed to be called the white bee because she appears in the whiteness of the fog of memory and swarms like a bee in our consciousness, trying to wake us up and remind us she is still here.“ M. M.

Marija Mandić (*1990) pursued her doctoral studies between 2015 and 2019 at the Faculty of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem (CZ), where she also worked as an external lecturer. She earned her Ph.D. in Visual Communication. In 2023, she was selected as a finalist for the Mangelos Award, part of the international Young Visual Artists Awards network. She is a recipient of a VID Foundation grant, the Dositeja scholarship awarded by the Fund for Young Talents of the Republic of Serbia, and a grant from the Czech Ministry of Education. www.mandicmarija.com

curators: Tereza Bonaventurová, Martin Fojtek

Our exhibition program is supported by grants from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the State Fund for Culture of the Czech Republic, the City of Prague and the Municipal District of Prague 1.