10 JULY – 6 AUGUST 2026
Organised by the Association Kolektiv Arhitekata
The exhibition explores architecture shaped by the global financial crisis of 2008, an event that shattered the illusion of continuous growth and development driven by capital. In the years which followed, new generations of architects emerged in the atmosphere of uncertainty: the market had collapsed, the myth of the ‘starchitect’ had begun to dissolve, and with it the idea of an architect figure as the sole source of meaning.
Architect Paulo Martins Barata, the author of the book ’Towards Metamodern Architecture’, has recognised this period as metamodernism. Metamodernism
follows up on the critical position of postmodernism, but it refuses to remain imprisoned in its cynicism and auto-irony. As Barata states, drawing on David Foster Wallace, irony is, above all, critical and destructive; however, it is also useless when it comes to building something to replace the contradictions which it exposes.
The exhibition ’After the Author: Metamodernism’ sees this movement as a response to economic and identity-related crises, as well as a change in the understanding of authorship, space and social role of architecture. The 2008 crisis was not only financial but also epistemological: it broke trust in systems, experts and stable narratives, while simultaneously opening a collective need for a new meaning. In the era in which money increasingly becomes an end in itself rather than a means, the exhibition poses a question on how architecture responds to new realities of life: human needs, common types of residence, work and belonging, as well as the possibility of decentring the human being as the primary protagonist of space.
The display at the SASA Gallery of Science and Technology brings together an array of architectural projects, their documentation in various forms, as well as artworks, stories and phenomena dealing with this situation. It is the goal of the exhibition to showcase the architecture of this age as an act of faith in uncertain circumstances: not belief in permanence, but in determination which continually reinvents itself. In this shifting perspective, architecture becomes what it is supposed to be: a language that society continues to write together.