Ivana Bašić

Ivana Bašić’s installation includes several sculptures placed inside the hall and outside in the courtyard. The central sculpture, Metabole, includes microphones that capture and amplify a loud, mechanical hammering sound. The hammers slowly pulverize the stone in rhythm with the artist’s breath.

　　On either side of Metabole, two sculptures—Blossoming Being #1 and #2—hang from the ceiling. Their flesh-colored, folded skin-like surfaces are partially covered with shiny metal. They look as if they are changing, pushing out from their shells.

　　Metanoia: Fallen Seed #1 and #2 appear like sprouts merging from the exhibition floor.

　　Bašić’s practice uses material as a symbolic codex: blown glass signifies breath, wax represents flesh, stone embodies matter under pressure, bronze serves as armor, and stainless steel evokes the forces of life and death that act on the body.

　　Ivana Bašić sculpture Metanoia combines breath, glass, concrete, and copper in the form of blossoming lotus flowers opening to the sky. At its center, a copper heart is blooming—opening like a flower. Around it, glass vessels appear to be breathing due to fog coming out from them through race car exhaust manifolds.

　　Metanoia is inspired by Spomeniks—abstract concrete monuments built in former Yugoslavia (1945-1990) to unify a nation fractured by wars. Bašić reflects on separation and longing, and the possibility of reuniting a fragmented society.

　　Grounded in the artist’s childhood memories of war, violence and national disintegration, the work examines humanity’s yearning for unity, the dissolution of the subjective self for the sake of the collective.

　　Ivana Bašić’s sculpture I had seen the centuries,… is a figure made of pink alabaster, wax and blown glass resting on four stainless steel legs. With its soft surface exposed, it appears half creature, half machine—inspired by a praying mantis, an insect linked to the afterlife in ancient Greek and Egyptian stories.

　　The figure is caught in the state of transformation, as if shedding its body, revealing a soft and moist core. Bašić explores transformation as a means of survival and adaptation. She compares it to how insects dissolve their bodies inside a cocoon and rebuild themselves into something entirely new.

　　Bašić’s work mixes strong and fragile materials—like metal, glass, and even her breath—to explore ideas about the body, change, and survival.