Visual Art
The birth of woman
In the post-Yugoslav diaspora, pulling burek dough to a translucent, paper-thin state is celebrated as a masterclass in domestic virtuosity, a skill passed down between generations of women and a source of pride and matrilineal connection. Pulled too far it tears; not far enough, it loses its texture. In this sculptural performance the dough becomes a monumental veil: I try to cover myself completely, but it sticks and lies heavy, every hole must be covered, and if I take too long it dries and cracks, so I can never fully shroud myself. Culture is carried somatically, inscribed on the flesh through domestic duty. The work honours the inheritance passed hand to hand, and asks how diaspora bodies hold, remake and keep alive the demand for cultural continuity.
Protein for the babies
This film centres on the bean water my mother used to keep me alive during the Bosnian War, a substitute for breast milk when stress stopped her own. Through montage, it binds the quiet gestures of preparing this broth in a London kitchen with fragments of the Bosnian landscapes my family moved through when the war began, and with old footage of my mother as a refugee in Germany. Her voice, recorded recently as she tells me about the bean water, drifts through the sequence alongside other family recordings, out of sync with the images, creating deliberate dislocation. Through these ruptures, survival, memory, and domestic ritual collide, allowing me to inhabit the past.
I, the archive
I, a refugee child, grew up feeling a distance between who I was and who the world had told me I was. In my home we were not refugees, we were trying to get as far away from that term as possible, and I never really understood why. I’m sure there are many reasons, but I can only look for my own. So I procrastinated too hard, flipped through hundreds of pages of archives in the London Library Times room, stumbling on countless photographs of other refugee children. I found myself viewing my own childhood back through a Western media lens. The refugee child, stripped of identity, overexposed and blurred in newspaper grain, faces rendered illegible, interchangeable. My eyes darted to the captions, or the absence of one. No name. Barely a caption. "Refugee woman with child." "Refugee children at ____ centre." A generic tag standing in for a person
I don't think anyone behind these images set out to erase anyone. A reporter on deadline, desperate to get the story out, to tell the world, filing a caption for a wire photo, is just doing the job in front of them. This is the visual grammar of the refugee: a political category, mourned or debated but rarely named. I want to know more so I pick up a book with actual words and read Liisa Malkki. She talks about how the category "refugee" flattens the specific into the generic, stripping people of biography, politics, and voice.
When I make my own images unrecognisable, I'm not trying to repeat what was done to those children in the archive. I'm trying to show what it still feels like from the inside that same distance I described earlier, between who I was and who the world decided I was, has never fully resolved.
The other work
I always knew my father as a doctor. When we became refugees, that stopped mattering, and he did anything he could for us to survive. The medical bag that once defined him became a relic of a life he couldn't keep. In this video, I go through his old medical kit item by item, accompanied by the Hippocratic oath. Then the footage runs in reverse, upside down, in silence. Without the oath, the objects lose their identity, they become shapes, textures, surfaces. What’s left is simply to study them as just that, objects: their age, their colour, their weight. What they were for is no longer the point. Like my family, like countless refugees, we fill the space with what we can, we take up the room with what will fit.
Za Baku, Za Dedu
I pluck a pigeon, rehearsing the act that kept people alive during the Siege of Sarajevo, when starvation pushed Sarajevans to eat the birds that endured the city's bombardment alongside them. Superimposed over this image, I eat the broth made from that same bird, saying "za baku, za dedu" before each bite, the words my mother once used to coax another bite into a reluctant child, repeated now to no one, the encourager and the encouraged collapsed into a single body. Plucking and eating do not sit beside each other as separate gestures but as one continuous act of survival, split across two superimposed images, the phrase repeating with each bite until comfort and necessity become indistinguishable. The piece asks what it means to perform a necessity I was spared, in the very words once used to make hunger bearable.
Floi
In collaboration with Helena Vondrus
Floi is an immersive audio installation that sonifies the health of Scotland’s peatlands. Using environmental data gathered by Peatland Action during a forest-to-bog restoration project in Dumfries and Galloway, the work translates metrics such as pH, water temperature and dissolved oxygen into sound.Each speaker emits the call of a species native to the site: natterjack toad, red grouse, stag, curlew, merlin falcon, which emerges only when conditions are within optimal ranges. Crescendos of animal calls and moments of silence render ecological vitality and fragility audible. As new data is gathered, Floi continues to evolve, bringing a remote landscape into the urban spaces where climate policy is shaped.