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Through the ancient ideas of Gnosticism and pneumatics, she finds ways to breathe new life into wax, stainless steel, and the pervasive presence of dust. At the art academy in Belgrade, they were painting nudes and nature, which couldn't have been further from anything I cared about. [...]this is an atemporal material, as opposed to the body, which is temporal. Stainless steel doesn't oxidize or erode; it effectively exists outside of time.
Ivana Basié, who grew up in war-torn Yugoslavia, uses the experience of violence and trauma as an entry point for making art. Based in ideas of transformation and dissolution, her sculptures and drawings have shifted increasingly toward the other-worldly, as she explores forms that seem to exist in a liminal space. Combining wax, glass, metal, stone, and dust with immaterial elements such as breath, force, torque and pressure, she creates mysterious structures that embody feeling and emotion.
Over the last 10 years, Basi 's work has gradually altered from bodily constructions such as Throat wanders down the blade (2016), employing breath and voice, to the animatronics of "Metempsychosis" (2024), first shown at the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin last year. Her preoccupation with dust, and what she calls "a language of becoming," permeates a forward-looking sculptural practice that also maintains ties to traditional approaches, particularly truth to materials. Whether wall- or floor-based, BaSié's works hover between human and non-human, material andimmaterial, creation and destruction. Through the ancient ideas of Gnosticism and pneumatics, she finds ways to breathe new life into wax, stainless steel, and the pervasive presence of dust. Finding parallels between stone and the post-mortem body, Basié also gestures toward alternative ways of being beyond the body, so that material metamorphosis brings the possibility of new metaphysical identity.
Beth Williamson: You grew up during an extremely difficult period in your country. Coming out of that world, how did you even imagine being an artist?
Ivana Bašic: Art was not part of my life-the culture was in such turmoil that there was no space for it. My personal way into art was an experience of claustrophobia, of just being in the body. There was intense trauma, and I was in an environment swollen with fear. During the bombing of 1999, we lived next to the military airport in social housing that was bombed 20 times a day. In my mind, it became an obsession to find a way out, out of those constraints. I studied graphic design, because art was not even an option. At the art academy in Belgrade, they were painting nudes and nature, which couldn't have been further from anything I cared about. After my undergraduate studies, I looked at my work with my professors-it was just bodies everywhere. It was clear that this thing was not going to go away, that I would have to form my life around it. I think that's how I got to art.
BW: What did you study in New York?
IB: I enrolled in what was a technology program, though I thought I was going to art school; my professors in Belgrade were infatuated with new media. This was supposed to be a new media program, but it ended up being a very technology-based program. People around me were making robots and iPhone apps, and I felt out of place. So, I took classes in anthropology and philosophy to find meaning, and then I stepped into materials to find myself. That's how I first engaged in art-making.
BW: You've spoken about Catherine Malabou's The Ontology of the Accident and Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Material as touchstones for your work. Why are they important to you?
IB: Negarestani's writing is interesting. I have been obsessed with dust for quite a while. And I am interested in the idea of dissolution -of becoming and unbecoming-and negotiating these conditions of transition into something formless. There is the idea of dust as an anonymous substance that inherently contains the world, since everything in the world can be reduced to dust. Thinking about the body, and the body's reduction to dust as well as its construction out of dust, what you're really talking about is the construction of an alien form from within, from the substance itself, an unknowable substance. I have tried to explore that through my work-how dissolution or reduction to dust is not a moment of loss, but a moment of potential, a moment of expansion and of liberation from the constraints of materiality.
In The Ontology of the Accident, Malabou was writing about plasticity, the capacity to transform without being destroyed. She was writing about metamorphosis as a process that happens in moments of exposure to extreme trauma. She was effectively saying that in those moments, our inherent instinct is fight and flight. If there is no open pathway for flight on the outside, it happens anyway. It just happens internally. The self leaves the body, constructing a post-traumatic subjectivity, which she calls the "figure of the void." This is literally what I felt happened to me, articulated clearly in her writing; it really hit me and almost validated what happened to me. Both Malabou and Negarestani have put my experience into language.
BW: There is such materiality to your work. You work with the idea that materials link to a conceptual counterpart, for instance, wax and flesh. Does that change, or is it constant throughout what you're doing?
IB: I was intuitively attracted to a lot of materials. Through working with them, I got to understand their nature, consistency, structure, and what it took for them to become- for me, that is what constitutes the truth of these substances. This is consistent across the work: the idea of wax almost narrating what is going to happen to the body, coming from fossils and the soil. I'm fundamentally working with the idea of the body in a slow return to this formal state that then ends up in the soil.
I am also interested in the nature of wax and glass as materials. I began thinking about glass in terms of breath, because the process of forming glass requires the breath. Breath is something else that I have been obsessed with; it is a symbol of life, but it also dissolves us as it's happening. In this way, material truth is completely aligned with what I am trying to do. I started with wax and glass, among other materials. I use stainless steel to represent the forces of life and death that act on the body. In a way, this is an atemporal material, as opposed to the body, which is temporal. Stainless steel doesn't oxidize or erode; it effectively exists outside of time. It also has medical and clinical associations, a controlled violence. It's hard, it takes force to work with the material. There's a certain brutality in the process, so it has the emotional charge that I was looking for in opposition to the body. Bronze and copper are materials that I started using for components that are like armor for the body, but they're metals that oxidize and corrode.
Stone came into my practice quite late. When I got my first stone, I sat with it for a year before I even dared to engage with it. I really wanted to understand what it took for this substance to become. I was thinking about the relationship between the body and the stone. I was thinking about the breath, slowly seeping out of the body. I was thinking about the idea of the breath as a symbol of life that is contained within the voids, and about life as almost slowly succumbing to pressure. Throughout life, breath is slowly being pushed out of the body, and all the cavities are collapsed. Post-mortem, the body is heavy, solid, cold matter-those are all properties of stone. It is as if a transition is already happening. When I was looking into the post-mortem phases of the body, I became fascinated with one of the four phases, which is called pallor mortis, or blueness of death. This is a phenomenon in which, due to the breakdown of hemoglobin in the blood vessels, a veinous patterning, called marbling, appears on the body. In my mind, it was as if the body was turning into marble, and then under more pressure, it was turning into dust.
BW: You've spoken about how it is sometimes assumed that there must be a digital or computer-generated element to your work, though there is not.
How do you get from concept to the finished work? Is it planned, or is it more intuitive?
IB: I start with an emotion: What is the feeling I'm looking for in the work? I have no idea what form it is going to take. For me, it's really the time working in clay that is important; this is where the form emerges. I know the nature of the materials that I use, and each one has an emotional charge, so it also becomes a set assemblage of what these materials feel like; I try to get the exact feeling that I'm looking for with them while bringing their individual truths into one unit. I almost feel that I go so deep that I tip onto the other side, and there, future and past and present, all things, co-exist.
BW: The work in "Temptation of Being" (2025), your recent show at Albion Jeune in London, seems to exist in a liminal state, somewhere between viewers feeling an embodied relationship and as if they might dissolve at any minute.
IB: When I was working on those pieces, they were on a border, appearing like insect pupae, with armor built around them because they're transitioning from one form into another. These works are made of the same ingredients but reconfigured into a completely new nature. The vulnerability of that process-because they cannot be protected in that moment, because theyre effectively dissolved-is something that interests me. The pieces themselves take a form between insect pupae and kernels or seeds, but they are also almost womb-like. They have armor and fleshy insides that seem to be birthing the stone, birthing the matter. The stone is gently carved, and it appears wet and fleshy. I was looking to represent the idea of the sun, the center or core, as well as the rays from images of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is a sacred symmetry that comes from depictions of the sun.
I found these amazing rods with slightly sharpened tips and a sort of dotting on them. It turned out that they're grounding rods, which are functional instruments used to ground a signal from space into the earth. Incredibly, this was exactly what I was trying to achieve-a merger of the otherworldly or celestial and the human or earthly, bringing it into one core. So, that piece is almost like a ground zero, like a birth of the world. In the floor-based Hypostasis, I was thinking about eggs waiting to be hatched, like the very origin of life. They are also like lungs, because they're empty glass vessels. They are like embryos, I would say, so they re almost like the origin of everything. And I would say that these forms, and the rest of the works in the show, are in exactly that space in between-in that liminal space before and then after something takes form. And that really starts with the drawings.
BW: In some of the wall-based sculptures, you've used pipes for the first time.
IB: They are basically referencing the exhaust headers of racing cars, which effectively function like a breathing apparatus. I was thinking a lot about the pneumatic, the breath, the pneumatic body. While I was building Passion of Pneumatics (2024), a large animatronic piece featured in "Metempsychosis" at MO.CO. Montpellier earlier this year, I was working with the breath and trying to make a breathing machine. It was in the process of making that work (which took me five years to build) that I learned about Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed that humanity can be split into three layers. One layer is the hylics, beings that are completely trapped within the senses, within the material realm. The second layer is the psychics, who have the capacity to evolve beyond that state, though it depends on their conditions. They are the ones who channel through their minds. The highest order of beings is the pneumatics. They are like spirits who experience material reality as an entrapment and can revert to the ethereal. So much of what I was doing was like that, trying to find a way back into the ethereal. The idea of the pneumatic body, the constructed pneumatic body, is what then resonated with the race car exhaust headers-almost as if this breath is entering the body and then seeping through it with the glass elements that droop from the base.
BW: Is there a sense that these recent works are less human and more otherworldly than your previous pieces?
18: Definitely. Bodies are barely present in these pieces. I think that they are trying to capture the origin or core, rather than the body as fully developed. In that way, they are speaking of a time before we were embodied. Therefore, they are more inhuman and detached from the form of the body and the being as we recognize it. I feel the forms have become more undefined, almost abstracted. The form that looks like a seed or a nucleus has existed in my subconscious for a long time, there is something about it that really resonates with me. I feel that the works are coming closer to it, but in the bit that's still very fleshy, meaty. Even so, I would say the body is much less present, and the forms are more detached from the human and this world.
BW: You have talked about the pneumatic body and Gnostic Christianity, and the Sacred Heart of Mary. Do you feel there is a spiritual element to your work?
IB: I grew up in a completely atheistic environment. We had communism for 40 years. Any kind of spirituality was expelled, so I was not exposed to it. But I think that, through my work, I have come to understand that there is a dialogue, and that I'm being guided, that I'm effectively just channeling. How do you represent this force that is so much larger than you, larger than consciousness, that exists on the other side, and that you're in direct dialogue with, and that you feel is really guiding the work? I was looking into the visual language around that. For me, it was about allowing that dialogue with the divine, with the sublime, to exist within the form as a formal language and within the pieces themselves. I am still attempting to develop that language.
Copyright International Sculpture Center 2025