e-mail: iskravu@gmail.com website: iskravuksic.online PORTFOLIO ISKRA VUKSIC 2016 - 2023 With Roman Tkachenko, I handtuft an ongoing series of carpets dedicated to loved ones who go through unexpected and sometimes involuntary migrations due to a political climate. Historically, the tapestry belongs both to castels and to nomadic tents. It is a monumental forever object that can be rolled, moved, migrated. The images refer to the specific stories of people who they were made for. 01. LIVE LAUGH MIGRATE Handtufted tapestries 2022, New Zealand Wool, sizes vary Collaboration with Roman Tkachenko 02. TIMEIS.CAPITAL Online platform and video, 2022-ongoing In collaboration with Roman Tkachenko, Maisa Imamovic and others Launched with the support of Institute of Network Cultures Timeis.capital is an online platform for audio-visual research on self-organisation in the art world. It is run by a collective of artists. It consists of interviews with people who self-organise and the 3D scans of the spaces from which they do this — project spaces, squats and living rooms. Our aim is to collect practice- based knowledge and strategies that are produced in the ephemeral landscape of artist-run initiatives. These forms the basis of 3d animated films scripted through a glossary of terms on self-organisation, which function as thematic reflections on the interviews. We see Timeis.capital as an alternative form of publishing, in which the viewer can access both raw research and our artistic interpretation of it. The Timeis.capital website with the interactive 3D scan of Peach, a Rotterdam-based project space No Sikiriki is a videogame based on snapshots of workers taken during the first pandemic summer of 2020. No Sikiriki explores the notion of waiting as a form of labour within precarious and informal jobs. The videogame features an expanded cast situated in St. Petersburg, the Adriatic Magistrala and Paris. A caricaturist, a landlady, a museum attendant and a manual labourer each face their own challenges in which they are forced to wait for work to pick up — or not. Their waiting is a psychological game of endurance, a battle against the elements and a tense see-saw between investment and return. No Sikiriki reflects on the loss of social security in the context of post-socialist realities and immigration. Its workers remain forever trapped in the precarious tension between work and wait. Choose your player and face the challenge: will you wait with your worker or leave the game? 03. NO SIKIRIKI Videogame, installation, 2022 collaboration with Ekaterina Volkova Soundtrack by Hayden Zappa Hook Exhibited in Donauweg 8 in February 2022 and in W139 Amsterdam in March 2022 Made with support of AFK Mijn Eerste Aanvraag Still image from the 3D animated character select screen of No Sikiriki, 2022 Exhibition view at W139 Amsterdam, March 2022 Exhibition view at Donauweg 8 Amsterdam, February 2022 Javna Tajna [obvious secret, from Serbo-Croatian] is a field research on the moonshine production of rakija — the fruit spirit of the Balkans. Through conversations with people surrounding the Kamen Artist Residency in Hercegovina, we explored how the knowledge of home-manufactured spirits is shared between generations. How did people learn to distill and do they still? Talking about rakija opens the door to accounts of shrinking rural regions, mass-emigration, conflict, care and the perseverance of tradition. In the performance-installation Javna Tajna , we took the audience on a walk from a vineyard without grapes, past a plum-tree without plums, to end with a toast of rakija in an installation of collected objects. Javna Tajna reflects on the importance of “being-there” for embodied knowledge that seems to be time and space specific. How do we brew rakija without grapes? Without hands to pick them? 04. JAVNA TAJNA Performance-installation, 2021 Collaboration with Ekaterina Volkova Kamen Artist Residency, Bosnia and Herzegovina With support of the Amarte development grant 05. JAVNA TAJNA Publication, 2021 Collaboration with Ekaterina Volkova Made with support of the Amarte development grant Re-published in March 2023 as an essay in Simulacrum Magazine The Javna Tajna publication is imagined like a photobook of collected photographs and fieldnotes. In diary- style language, it takes the reader through conversations and observations of Herzegovina. Prominent characters of the research — a saleswoman on the market called Slavica, the rakija-legend Baba Olga, our printer and other encounters — share their insights on rural life and heritage through their own experiences with rakija-production. It contains an English translation of the Serbo-Croatian performance text on shrinking communities and embodied knowledge. The cover and introduction text are derived from a series of posters which were part of the Javna Tajna installation. Connection to new work: Every project on the field brings unexpected challenges, insights and amazing gems with it. Therefore, I found it very important in Javna Tajna to keep notes and take photographs, regardless whether somehting in the first sight was connected to the project. For example, the village I stayed in was trapped in a forest fire, I visited a Yugoslav cemetery which seemed unrelated and so on. As the project developed, many of these things informed by understanding of my surroundings. They were very much connected to the social, political and ecological changes of the last decades. So many of these snapshots made it into the publication which allowed the public to understand the observations that out ideas were formed on. I like projects that can have many different iterations and that continue to inspire because the complex themes start to unfold during the process. I aim to keep notes and take footage during Turist so I can potentially publish them in the future and continue to work on this theme. Intuitive Science is an artistic research project through which we explored generational gaps and polarization in contemporary politics. The repetition of the manufacturing rituals of our ancestors functions as a language through which we communicate with their spirits. The project explores the way that knowledge is transferred between generations and how we can tap into its potential for joy and resilience for contemporary times. In the project, we worked with a Eastern European DIY style fermentation device. The materials, yeast cultures and the conditions which sustain them, are alive and create autonomous movement. Rather than having full control on shaping them, we are in dialogue with each other. 06. INTUITIVE SCIENCE Artistic research, 2021 Collaboration with Ekaterina Volkova Intuitive Science studio test https://vimeo.com/556905668 07. INVISIBLE, OR FOR MOHAMMED Ring, photography and text, 2021 Personal work Published in Metropolis M, February 2021 Invisible, or for Mohammed reflects on my involvement in Dutch politics as a member of a diasporic community. More specifically, I sketched my relationship to recognisable and racialised minorities and the act of rebuilding solidarity in a society which prefers to separate highly educated, white, young and otherwise ‘invisible’ migrants from non-Western, non-white persons or those who speak with an accent or carry other markers. This impossible distinction creates separate categories and levels of acceptance even for children and their parents. The ring acts as a visible marker in order to reject those categories and rebuild possible modes of solidarity between people with migration backgrounds. The photograph was published in Metropolis M, together with a text I wrote as a result of a conversation with two other ex-Yugoslavian artists (Kostana Banovic and Kristina Benjocki). Greetings from the Magistrala is a series of 12 postcards photographed in villages among the Magistrala road that spans through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Montenegro. It is a road that was built during the presidency of Tito in the time of Yugoslavia. It changed the faith of the Adriatic coast, previously inaccessible and economically isolated due to its difficult position between steep mountains, the karst soil and the sea. Tito imagined the touristic potential in building the road and with it, brought economic growth to impoverished regions. Today, it is still central to tourism and the labour connected to it. Many people survive all year round from the short tourist season due to their connection to the road. 08. GREETINGS FROM THE MAGISTRALA 12 printed postcards, 2020, 148x105mm personal work 09. I AM NOT IN THESE PLACES THESE PLACES ARE IN ME two zoom recordings, 2020, 10’’ Personal work Two short video’s recorded during the first pandemic lockdown. I was spending a lot of time in videocalls, specifically using it to continue my educational activities and meetings with students at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. For myself and for students, I was thinking about how to use a generic and coorporate video- conferencing medium in a way through which artistic work and ideas can be communicated. I recorded the video’s directly from zoom, using the built-in filters that the platform offers and incorporating landscape photographs that were already living on my drive. It was a way of revisiting places during a time of standstill. I used the video’s for my website, built in the same time, which I used as a windowdisplay for more artistic text and image rather than a portfolio website. www.iskravuksic.online FREEZE! is an interactive performance which reflects on the acquisition of residence permits from a non- EU citizen perspective. As a fictional economy, FREEZE! questions the indirect purchasing power of legal documents as well as the exclusive nature of casual consumption activities. Is control only perpetrated by authorities or does it travel down the line? FREEZE! consists of a red and a blue ice cream booth where visitors show their ID in exchange for free ice cream. In the transaction, it is revealed that non-EU citizens receive red icecream while EU citizens receive the blue one. The ice cream stains the lips of the visitors in this colour coding. The FREEZE! exhibition text was printed on wrappers around ice cream cones. 10. FREEZE! Performance-installation, 2017 Collaboration with Ekaterina Volkova Exhibited at ‘Who’s Afraid of Provocation?’, Sociëteit Sexyland, Amsterdam, 2017 11. ANAPATIN® Installation-performance, 2016 Collaboration with Ekaterina Volkova April—May 2016, ‘Imagine Europe’, BOZAR, Brussels June 2016, ‘Higher Resolutions’, Burgerweeshuis, Amsterdam Imagine a world in which political apathy is classified as a mental disorder. Anapatin® is a medication that cures voter apathy in a speculative future based on the current stigmatisation of voter abstention. As a fictional company, Anapatin Pharmaceuticals focuses on resurrecting a system which increasingly fails to engage citizens without offering alternatives for their limited influence. Anapatin® is the last of our series informed by an interest in voter apathy. The installation resembles the interior of a medical clinic with boxes of Anapatin® , capsules and custom plexiglass furniture. Various performative and designed elements create an atmosphere of biopolitical coercion through which visitors’ decision-making ability is challenged.