Aleksandar Stanojević Kempa (1992, Paraćin) is a Serbian painter and visual artist whose practice has, in recent years, evolved toward spatial and material experiments. During his residency stay in Miami as part of Bioskop Balkan’s participation in Art Miami in December 2025, the artist materializes a wooden sculpture shaped using papier-mâché technique. Emerging in direct dialogue with the site of his stay, the sculpture departs from the form of a palm: not as an exotic symbol, but as a structural and ambient element that condenses the local landscape, climate, and rhythm of the city. Through its layered, hand-built surface, the work explores the relationship between natural form and its cultural adaptation into symbol, insisting on process, material fragility, and the temporality of the context in which the piece is created.
The materiality of the work, a wooden structure wrapped in layers of papier-mâché further emphasizes its “transience” and tactility, establishing a subtle counterpoint between the sculpture’s monumental presence and its inherent fragility. The palm, as a starting reference, here transforms into a rhythmic structure: a vertical that dissolves, bends, and fragments, akin to a body exposed to the external forces of climate, wind, and gaze. In this sense, the sculpture does not represent the landscape but translates it into an experience of place, a form that is simultaneously organic and artificial.
Aleksandar’s work in Miami can be read as a shift in focus from the figure toward ambience, from representation toward state. The sculpture functions as a spatial record of the stay, a trace of the encounter with a city that exists between nature and spectacle. Relying on the ambivalence of form and the openness of meaning, it offers the viewer an extended experience of looking and bodily presence in space.
Aleksandar, who has behind him more than twenty solo exhibitions realized in cities such as Trieste, Budapest, Timișoara, and Paris, consistently develops an artistic practice in which direct experiences are organically inscribed. His work testifies to how a contemporary artistic position is formed precisely in that zone of overlap, between personal poetics and broader cultural context.
Bioskop Balkan and the Saša Marčeta Foundation continuously support artists and contemporary art through programs that encourage professional development and international exchange. Through residency initiatives and collaborations at events like the Art Miami fair. Such support contributes to strengthening the artistic scene and encourages authors to consistently develop their own work within the contemporary artistic framework.