An exquisite tension characterizes the sculptures and installations of Bojan Šarčević: tension between his wildly diverse choice of materials, between the fragility and the assertiveness of his forms, between the relationship of an organic universe to a functional one, between the cold “neutrality” of the exhibition space and the messy reality of a lived environment, and between time and space, viewed within their social, historical, cultural and psychological dimensions. The practice of the artist is often marked by a strong architectural sensitivity and an interest in the creation of formal systems that challenge certainties and stereotypes, raising questions regarding the empirical, theoretical and sensory understanding that the individual has of the world. The installation Retribution (2021), on display at the 58th October Salon, consists of a series of commercial freezers, filled with thick layers of frost and emitting an intermittent sound piece. The triad of industrially made monoliths evokes both the aesthetic codes of Minimalism and abandoned food storage containers. The hum of the devices is complemented by fragments of the melody of a Rom/Serbian folkloric song from the 1980s, Livadama, Dolinama, by Vida Pavlović, which draws upon a local ethos mixed with innocence, emancipation and forbidden love. This sentimental folk ballad is interspersed with fragments of a more recent song by the Swedish metal band Meshuggah, Demiurge, characterized by a throbbing score and interwoven with abstract references to armed conflicts and humanitarian crises. Transducer speakers installed within the freezers emit vibrations that rely on solids to generate sound. As such, the thick layer of frozen condensation that has formed from the moisture in the air of the exhibition space becomes the physical carrier for sound wave transmission, creating sounds that are quite literally born from the piece’s immediate context—the very air around it. The effect is one of nostalgia and indictment: anguish and history are mixed with references to the culture of consumerism, the readymade, and a past that is both frozen and still, today, constantly gaining layers of new frost.