Visual Art
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. The film uses montage to bind together 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. It cuts through video of my mother teaching me to make Burek, a traditional Bosnian dish. Contemporary recordings of my family’s voices drift into the sequence out of sync with the images, creating deliberate dislocation. Through these ruptures, the work lets survival, memory, and domestic ritual collide, allowing me to inhabit the past.
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.
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, eventually delivering KFC after we moved to Canada. 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, then play the footage in reverse. Run forward, the image is accompanied by the doctor's oath. Run in reverse, the same footage is accompanied by a fast-food preparation protocol, delivered in the same tone. The two roles are never explained or reconciled, only set against each other, forward and backward, oath and protocol, as if both were spoken with equal seriousness because, for him, they were.
Like mother
I make bean water, the drink women made during the war in Bosnia when they could not produce milk for infants. No recipe. No instruction. Just instinct. This work explores a quiet inheritance between women: the knowledge that appears in crisis, the improvisation of care, the body’s refusal to surrender. I brew the beans and drink them from a coffee mug, replacing the drink of life and placing it into ritual. What was once survival becomes ceremony. What was once absence becomes continuation.
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.