Xiaofu Wang's work »The Tower« tells personal stories that unfold side by side in the Genex Tower in Belgrade. Designed in the 1970s by Mihajlo Mitrović, the iconic building once symbolized the economic ambitions of socialist Yugoslavia, representing progress, power, and a belief in the future.
Today, the building is a space for numerous biographical escapisms. While large parts of the former Generaleksport headquarters are deserted, life continues to unfold in one of the towers: love stories, coming of age, everyday life, artistic practice. Everything exists side by side.
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Xiaofu Wangs Arbeit »The Tower« erzählt persönliche Geschichten, die sich im Genex Tower in Belgrad nebeneinander abspielen. Entworfen wurde das ikonische Gebäude in den 1970er-Jahren von Mihajlo Mitrović und stand einst für den wirtschaftlichen Anspruch des sozialistischen Jugoslawiens, für Fortschritt, Macht und Zukunftsglauben.
Heute ist das Gebäude ein Raum für zahlreiche biografische Eskapismen. Während große Teile des ehemaligen Generaleksport-Hauptquartiers verwaist sind, entfaltet sich ein einem der Türme weiterhin Leben: Liebesgeschichten, Erwachsenwerden, Alltag, künstlerische Praxis. Alles existiert nebeneinander.
📸 @_xiaofuwang | a submission to the PORTRAITS Award 2024
#XiaofuWang #Escapism #portraitsphotographyaward #portraits #hellerau #portraitshellerau #artandculture #internationalcompetition
The presentation will be conducted in English
As part of BPM Book Week 2026, we are pleased to invite you to an special event dedicated to photobooks and the stories they hold. This session brings together three photographers whose recent works are deeply connected to Belgrade, each offering a personal and distinct perspective on the city.
Join us for a series of presentations where image, memory, and place intertwine, opening up different ways of seeing and understanding Belgrade today.
We would like to invite you to como to one more sesion where 3 differents photographers they will present their last work.... highly connected to our city, Belgrade.
Konstantin Kondrukhov
Looking for safety and new opportunities in 2022, I found myself in Belgrade — a city I didn’t know much about before. My choice wasn’t random: friends of mine, concert organizers who had come a few months earlier, announced a music festival in Belgrade called Changeover. That festival became a bridge to a new reality and the beginning of my journey. Through photographs, I will share the story of the people, experiences and sounds that surrounded me during this challenging but amazing time. This will be a photobook about change and the invisible connection that brings us together through music in a new place.
Ljuba Sorokina - Blok 70
Blok 70 is a photographic project focused on the Chinese market in New Belgrade, approached as an already alien and visually saturated environment. The artist works with the market as a collection of spatial fragments - shelves, signs, packaging, colours, improvised structures - paying attention to how the space is assembled and how it is experienced rather than how it is explained.
Xiaofu Wang - The Tower
The Tower is part ode, part record, and part speculation about one of Belgrade’s most important buildings— Genex Tower, a symbol of the city and one of the most recognizable brutalist structures in the world. Situated at the edges of documentary photography, the photographs in the book were taken over nine separate trips to Belgrade with an analogue, medium-format camera between 2021 and 2024.
𝑺𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝑭𝒊𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 explores how places are never neutral but shaped by the collective longings, narratives, and fantasies projected onto them. The exhibition brings together two distinct approaches to fabrication: Jack Garland’s ‘Waco’, which begins with a real event and traces its transformation into myth, and Benjamin Pfau’s ‘Die Insel’, where imagined terrains acquire the weight of lived experience. An ongoing collaboration in the Ruhr area extends these investigations, re-imagining a landscape marked by industry and migration through the same strategies of staging and projection. Together, they show how place is always both material and imaginary, structured as much by memory and desire as by physical ground.
@benjaminpfau@jackgarland@_xiaofuwang@sanktstudio
Announcing 𝑺𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝑭𝒊𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, an exhibition featuring the work of Jack Garland and Benjamin Pfau, curated by Xiaofu Wang at Sankt Studio, Berlin.
Dates: September 18–21, 2025
Vernissage: September 18, from 18:00
More to follow!
Poster by @andrejalepir
Some snaps from my recent USA book tour. Moments spent blissfully ignoring Trump, ICE, people sleeping under bridges, fentanyl, the cost-of-living crisis and the general feeling of impending doom. Ahh, to be a tourist.
But seriously, thanks to the friends - old and new - who made this a wonderful trip. Much love to you all.
Congratulations to my talented Tarisio colleague Xiaofu Wang, whose book is being featured at the AIPAD Photography Show in NYC! The Tower is a powerful exploration of the iconic Genex Tower in Belgrade and a stirring tribute to architecture, memory, and meaning. Xiaofu will be returning to Berlin soon so don’t miss your chance to meet her this weekend at the Park Avenue Armory!
Thanks @marielostintranslation for the excellent article in @fisheyelemag . Read it here: https://fisheyemagazine.fr/article/xiaofu-wang-leve-le-rideau-de-la-genex-tower/
Last chance to see our exhibition Fünfzehn von Siebzehn at @photobasteizurich ! The Finnisage will take place on the evening of the 22nd. The Tower is available at the bookshop there, as well as at @neverstopreading_zh . Exhibition stills by @janickentremont .
