Ivana Bašić (b. 1986 in Belgrade, Serbia) has been creating works that address vulnerability and transformation of the body and human matter. Her sculptures, which consist of wax, glass, steel, alabaster, oil paint, and immaterial matter such as breath and pressure, prompt the viewers to radically reimagine posthuman ontology.
In Breath seeps through her tightly closed mouth | Position II: Swelling #2 (2019), Bašić cleverly employs the malleable attribute of blown glass to create a black, translucent, condensed, slime-like non-being that is awaiting rebirth; the work mirrors the artist’s postmodern identity and reveals the infinite plasticity of her selfhood.
Another powerful sculpture named as I too had thousands of blinking cilia, while my belly, new and made for the ground was being reborn | Position III (#3) (2020). The chrysalis-inspired work consists of a white body made of wax adorned with black oil paint and a gleaming bronze metal armour, representing the protection against the fragility of the ongoing metamorphosis beneath the cocoon. Two black glass drops ooze out from an opening in its back, depicting breath they indicate the vitality of the in-between-state being. This work considers the chrysalis as an event of potential liberation for human subjects from any identity politics and human ontologies.
Historically the human has been sustaining a symbolic structure instilled with sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, ethnocentric, and anthropocentric presumptions. When fights against all sorts of -isms towards the external do not seem to work, the artist decides to take on a flight towards the internal. Bašić adopts the process of insectile metamorphosis and endeavours to truly transform the body through implosion, to a point where discussion on humanity becomes impossible since she has already created its ontology to bring the existing one to an end.
