Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates)
A solo exhibition by Barbara Knežević
Run in association with the Solstice Arts Centre
Wexford Arts Centre
14th February – 20th March 2026
Opening Event: Saturday 14th February at 2pm
Curator Rayne Booth in conversation with Artist Barbara Knežević
Wexford Arts Centre is pleased to present Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates), an exhibition of new sculpture and film work by Barbara Knežević. The exhibition will run in the lower and upper galleries from Saturday, 14th February, to Friday 20th March, 2026.
In Gvozdene Kapije / The Iron Gates, Knežević brings together film and sculpture to interpret the histories, stories, and materiality of a region in eastern Serbia known as Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates): the deep gorge at Đerdap on the Danube River, bordering Serbia and Romania.
At the centre of the exhibition is a 48-minute single-channel film that focuses on a group of 10,000-year-old sculptures uncovered at Lepenski Vir during preparatory works for the Iron Gates Dam, a major hydroelectric project completed in 1972 by the governments of the former Yugoslavia and Romania. The film traces this layered history through material and oral accounts of the region, channeled through five non-human narrators; material, infrastructural, animal, and geological actors who shape and inhabit the environment of the Iron Gates gorge.
Composed of original and archival footage, personal testimonies, interviews, staged imaginings and choreography, the film gathers pace and moves between fact and speculative fiction. Through montage, it retraces stories of displacement, migration, making, sculpture, and the natural world along the Danube.
Alongside the film, Knežević presents a series of large-scale sculptures fabricated from industrial materials including welded chain, mesh, steel, in dialogue with more intimate domestic materials such as ceramics, fabric, stone, and wood. These works appear both as sculptural objects in the gallery and as ‘actors’ within the film itself, a form the artist describes as a ‘sculptural film’.
Knežević is an artist of Serbian, Polish, and Australian heritage living in Ireland and Gvozdene Kapije / The Iron Gates locates this diasporic lineage in her work for the first time. This work situates the artist’s family histories alongside the wider narratives of the Danube and the Balkans, where personal stories intersect with geological time, infrastructural transformation, and the long culture of making along the river.
The production of Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates) was funded by the Arts Council through a Project Award, with additional commissioning support provided by Solstice Arts Centre and the National Sculpture Factory. Its presentation at Wexford Arts Centre is curated by Rayne Booth as part of a tour produced by Booth with funding provided by the Arts Council through the Touring of Work Scheme. The tour also includes Solstice Arts Centre, Sirius arts Centre, and the Regional Cultural Centre.
Wexford Arts Centre is supported by the Arts Council and Wexford County Council.
Gallery hours are Tuesday to Friday from 10am to 5pm and Saturday from 10am to 4pm.
For further information on Gvozdene Kapije (The Iron Gates) or artist Barbara Knežević contact Catherine Bowe – Curator, Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford on +353 (0)53 91 23764 or info@wexfordartscentre.ie.
