Content area
Full text
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...