The 57th October Salon: The Marvellous Cacophony

The Marvellous Cacophony, the catalogue accompanying the 57th October Salon, was published in the context of the 2018 biennial curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran and Danielle Kvaran. Conceived as an exploration of the increasingly fragmented and polyphonic condition of contemporary art, the publication reflects on a global art world no longer defined by a single centre, movement, or ideological framework, but by a multiplicity of divergent voices, forms, and political realities.

Taking its title from the notion of “cacophony,” the exhibition proposed contemporary art itself as a condition of productive dissonance — a field shaped by overlapping identities, conflicting narratives, and heterogeneous artistic languages. Rather than attempting to impose coherence, The Marvellous Cacophony embraced contradiction, instability, and plurality as defining conditions of the twenty-first-century cultural landscape. The exhibition was conceived as an immersive constellation of artworks functioning simultaneously as installation, social mirror, and geopolitical map.

Bringing together over seventy international artists across multiple venues in Belgrade, the catalogue documents works spanning sculpture, painting, installation, video, sound, and performance. Participating artists included Jasmina Cibic, Olafur Eliasson, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman, Takashi Murakami, Anselm Kiefer, Helen Marten, Cao Fei, David Maljković, Aleksandra Domanović, Pamela Rosenkranz, Tom Sachs, Marguerite Humeau, and Anicka Yi, among many others.

The publication situates the October Salon within broader discussions surrounding globalisation, shifting geopolitical identities, post-national conditions, migration, class, technology, and the instability of cultural meaning. Rather than presenting contemporary art as unified or universal, the exhibition foregrounded its fractured condition — a world of simultaneous and competing aesthetic, political, and cultural realities. In this sense, cacophony was framed not negatively, but as a generative state through which new forms of relation, resistance, and artistic imagination might emerge.

Through essays, curatorial texts, and visual documentation, the catalogue captures the October Salon as a temporary architecture of dissonance: an exhibition attempting to mirror the complexity, instability, and multiplicity of contemporary global culture itself.