Meet the Artist: Ivana Bašić Rebuilds the Body from Fragments of War

As she prepares for her participation in this year’s Taipei Biennial—opening this November under the curatorial theme “Whispers on the Horizon” we spoke to Belgrade artist Ivana Bašić about her solo exhibition last month in London, laying the conceptual and material groundwork for what promises to be her most significant institutional exhibition to date. Set in the quiet dim of Albion Jeune, a buzzed-about new entrant to London’s contemporary art scene, “Temptation of Being” was held between the 20th of February to 17th April, inviting viewers into a contemplative, otherworldly realm where corporeal boundaries blur and abstract forms hover in moments of transformation.

At once violent and tender, delicate and unsettling, sculptural forms cast in a transgressive palette of wax, alabaster stone, blown glass, bronze and stainless steel, gleamed off dimly lit walls with a strange effervescence, their ethereal form locked in continuous flux and quiet negotiation. Gestating in suspended states, figures are caught mid-transition—birthing, shedding, disolving—conjuring a liminal realm where form lingers, neither fully formed nor entirely undone.  A scene of perpetual becoming, Bašić’s vision gestures toward an expanded continuum of existence: the body as neither origin nor end, but forever half-formed, almost coming to life or almost falling apart, hovering between flesh and machine, life and aftermath. 

A Personal Reckoning with the Body’s Fragility

Indelibly marked by her early exposure to violence during the Yugoslav wars, Bašić’s work stems from a personal reckoning with the body’s fragility and material limits, instilling in her an impulse to transcend what she calls the “tangible limits of physical existence.” Instead of dwelling on her suffering, her work wrests paradoxical hope from it: metamorphosis becomes an act of survival, destruction the precursor to transformation—a threshold through which the self might become other, matter might return to dust, and identity might fracture toward renewal. 

“Instead of dwelling on her suffering, her work wrests paradoxical hope from it,”

In a sublimation of her own personal trauma, she posits a posthumanist lens to our most pressing ontological fixations, inviting us to question: the fragility of the human body, the possibility of becoming Other, the boundary between life and death, and the enduring quest for immortality. Conversing with her as the clamour of opening night subsided, we probed her on her harrowing experiences of war and how they came to inform her practice— transforming “one of the bloodiest wars in recent history” into a catalyst for profound philosophical inquiry, translating its traumas into a hopeful premise: that within dissolution lies rebirth; within vulnerability, power; and within loss, possibility.

A Biomechanical Landscape Unfolds 

Poised between organic fragility and alien otherness, Bašić’s realm of shifting materiality unfolds across the gallery like a biomechanical landscape. Spanning sculpture, drawing and installation, materials slip between supple, organic textures and smooth, metallic sheens —their fluid surfaces further evoking sites of ongoing transformation.

On opposing walls, sculptures of wax, white bronze, blown glass, copper, and stainless steel seem as if moulting. Flesh-like forms droop from rods, encased in plated armours akin to insect chrysalises, both shielded and exposed, vulnerable and protected. Beneath exoskeletal shells, folds of wax peel back, giving way to a fragile, living nucleus of alabaster stone throbbing with quiet unease, its damp surface delicately carved with a viscous, living wetness akin to placenta or intestinal walls, eerily evoking the vulnerability of the organic form as it portends to its inevitable and eventual decay. 

The Mesmeric Details by Artist Ivana Bašić 

Pooled on the wooden floor, three pale, ovoid sculptures lie undisturbed, beckoning the viewer as they glow beneath a muted spotlight. Like an abandoned clutch of alien eggs, these delicate, blown-glass capsules, titled Hypostasis, emit a mystical presence amidst the surrounding gloom, as if having stumbled upon something secret, like precious incubating vessels from another planet, pulsating with life not yet formed. Hermetically sealed orbs of dust and the artist’s breath, their satin-like surfaces obscure a clear view—too opaque to reveal what lies within— hinting at something suspended inside: a quiet life form awaiting to be hatched, dawdling on the edge of existence, hovering between inert matter and animate being.

Punctuating Bašić’s sculptural terrain, ethereal watercolour drawings thread the gallery walls, their soft, elliptical forms drifting through diaphanous washes of ashen greys, sooty blacks, and tender pinks, conjuring womb-like environments that recall fetal silhouettes or distant nebulae. Pigments seep into paper, blurring outlines into feathered veils while pale washes sweep into darker contours, birthing amorphous, organic forms that evoke a stellar nursery or primordial genesis. As moisture permeates the canvas, the paper warps, buckles, creases, giving rise to delicate topographies that echo sculptural reliefs, quietly registering the materials’ subtle transformations wrought over time. 

“Ethereal watercolour drawings thread the gallery walls,”

Over shifting surfaces, indistinct edges dissolve into blank margins, producing delicate distortions and vaporous contours that—shaped by the patient pull of gravity and the gentle weight of water—hint at forms only partially formed or in the process of evaporating. Like fragile relics of creation, Bašić’s Ungrounding series essentially depict matter in the midst of both emergence and decay.  “A blueprint for the formation of [her] world,” they enact a “quantum return“ to “the most basal and indivisible ingredients of existence”, capturing the primordial state in which all elements exist before taking form, essentially, charting the conceptual genesis behind all her sculptures. 

Offering Optimistic Space

Far from bleak, Bašić’s dust-to-dust cosmology is an “optimistic, generative space” of possibility. Invoking the biblical adage “dust to dust,” she reminds us of our creation and ultimate return to the earth. Dissolution becomes origin: a quantum return to zero that is less an erasure than an opportunity to begin again, much like nebulae—which at once stellar nurseries and celestial graveyards, continually give rise to new life from cosmic dust and earthly ash alike—embodying the idea that every end feeds a new beginning. 

“Far from bleak, Bašić’s dust-to-dust cosmology is an ‘optimistic, generative space’ of possibility,”

Threaded throughout the show’s conceptual architecture and philosophical substrate, a tactile “material codex” becomes apparent, reverberating across the entire body of work, speaking as forcefully as the sculptural forms themselves. As semantic as it is formal, the artist’s material language is a meticulous, consistent and integral element of her practice, reading as importantly to the interpretation of her work as the figures themselves—each substance selected not only for its physical and aesthetic qualities, but for the symbolic and philosophical weight it carries, linking the physical to the philosophical. 

Wax, with its skin-like translucency, embodies “impermanent flesh”— malleable, mortal, melting with time, its petroleum origin connecting it back to ancient, fossilised forms, reiterating the idea that from decay, life emerges only to return to it.  Glass, speaking to “the breath that formed it” is fragile, transparent, easily shattered, tasked with preserving what is most fleeting and precious as it both protects and enshrines it.  As for Bronze and steel, they encapsulate the “armour”, “protective strategies of an organism,” and the “violence of inevitable forces of life and death”, their interplay creating a narrative in itself of the body’s enduring strength and resilience, and its vulnerability to the forces that act upon it.  Stone and dust, by contrast, evoke the body’s gradual dissolution and return to origin, stone speaking to compression, matter solidified under immense pressure; and dust to its final undoing—fine, particulate, and irreducible. 

Together, they chart a cyclical process of decay and becoming: from organic flesh to mineral matter, and finally to dust—what Bašić calls “the irreducible origin of all creation.” Drawing on the material philosophy of Reza Negarestani, each mote of dust is imbued with latent potential: “If we dig far enough into any substance, we reach the unknowable,” “inserting endless potential into our idea of what a human can be.” Far from a loss, the disintegration of the body becomes a “moment of radical potential”, a slip-point signalling a passage from “human to non-human, telluric to celestial, and bound form to the boundless.”

Entering into Otherworldly Logic

In the end, moving through Bašić’s “Temptation of Being” feels a lot like entering a strange and elegiac—if not otherworldly—logic: material limits become thresholds for redefinition; traumas unfold as sites of metamorphosis, and fragility is recast as the precondition for renewal—all the while being warped in a time loop where nothing ends but everything reshapes, and all that breaks apart begins again. Entities hover in states of perpetual transition—flesh shedding, matter warping, forms dissolving—only to hint at their eventual return. The body, no longer a closed system, becomes a porous, mutable threshold constantly edging toward something other than itself. 

“Material limits become thresholds for redefinition,”

Echoing Reza Negarestani’s notion of dust, the temporal logic of origin and end collapse, replaced instead by a cyclical, recursive temporality of dust-to-dust cosmology in which the end of corporeal life is simply the prelude to some other form of existence. Cast in a light both hopeful and solemn, commemorative yet unsentimental, Bašić’s quivering organics reveal the redemptive possibilities of vulnerability: contorted anatomies whisper wishful platitudes of destruction not as ruin but evolutionary advance; traumas not as permanent scars but openings for reinvention; dissolution not as ends but an opportunity for rebirth. 

Marked by grave beauty and piercing insight, her work stands as a quiet testament to the enduring plasticity of the human spirit, offering a hopeful promise born not despite loss but because of it: that when the body breaks down, it also breaks open—toward possibility, toward otherness, towards becoming—surviving in a form that never dies but is continually remade. As we confront ecological unravelling, collapsing certainties, and shifting definitions of selfhood, Bašić’s practice feels uncannily prescient— its trembling forms reflecting not what we are, but gesturing toward what, in a future shaped by fragility and flux, we have the capacity to become. 

“Her work stands as a quiet testament to the enduring plasticity of the human spirit,”