Ivana Bašić b. 1986

Ivana Bašić (b. 1986, Belgrade) lives and works in New York, USA. Her work addresses the vulnerability and transformation of the body and human matter. By using different materials (such as wax, glass, steel, alabaster, oil paint) and combining these with technique and immaterial matters (such as breath, pressure and rigidity), the sculptures acquire a posthuman quality. The colours she chooses refer strongly to the human body. Pink, white and natural combinations are reminiscent of blood, bone and flesh.

Bašić received her bachelor’s degree from Belgrade University and her master’s degree from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have taken place at Albion Jeune, London (2025); Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2025); MO.CO., Montpellier (2025); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2024); François Ghebaly, New York (2022); November Gallery, Belgrade (2018); Marlborough Contemporary, New York (2017); and Annka Kultys Gallery, London (2016). The artist participated in group exhibitions held at Albion Jeune, London (2025); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2023); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2023); Francesca Minini Gallery, Milan (2022); Anonymous Gallery, New York (2022); Someday Gallery, New York (2022); Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2022); National Gallery Prague (2021); Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College (2020); Lyles & King, New York (2020); Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); Athens Biennal, Athens (2018); Belgrade Biennial, Belgrade (2018); and Hessel Museum of Art, Annendale- On-Hudson (2017), among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum, New York. She has participated in the Fourteenth Taipei Biennial, Whispers on the Horizon in 2025.

Whispers on the Horizon, 14th Taipei Biennial, November 2025 - March 2026

For the Taipei Biennial 2025, Ivana Bašić parallels the histories of Taiwan and Yugoslavia, both marked by civil wars and enduring national divisions, contemplating separation, longing, and the impossibility of reuniting fragmented subjectivities into a utopian whole. 

Charged by the artist’s childhood experiences of war, violence, brutality, and physical entrapment during the collapse of her native Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Bašić’s humanoid sculptures address sweeping themes of intergenerational trauma, post-humanist feminism, and the quest for immortality, but these far-reaching subjects are refracted through the disarmingly tender bodies in her work, clinging to support structures such as pipes and prosthetics that hold them in place.

Metempsychosis, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia, 2025

The solo exhibition of Ivana Basic's works presents a unique epistemological landscape of the posthuman body, appearing as a postbiological relic, fragile yet unrelenting, caught in a process of ontological mutation. The sculptures and drawings on view explore a posthumanist vision of human evolution, wherein the work of art becomes a material foundation for speculation about the body not as a stable referential framework of identity anchored in solid contours, but as a mutable substance through which the possibility of survival amid radical transformation is considered.

Metempsychosis, MO.CO Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier, France, 2025

Metempsychosis takes the  form of a rite of passage, a journey  through space that questions the material and metaphysical boundaries of humanity. Featuring more than 20 works, the  exhibition brings together sculptures,  drawings, video, and a seven-metre-long robotic altarpiece. The display takes visitors on a surreal journey in which the dissolution of bodies and the material  world is seen not as a loss, but rather as an  instance of radical potential.

Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics, Schinkel Pavillon, 7 June - 1 September 2024

A storm cuts through the Schinkel Pavillon’s historic building as clouds of dust wander across the first institutional solo exhibition of New York-based artist Ivana Bašić (b. 1986 in Belgrade, Serbia). Progressing like a rite of passage through both floors of Schinkel’s iconic octagonal halls, Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics presents sculptures, video, drawings, and a large-scale pneumatic centerpiece in Bašić’s poetic, deeply nuanced material language.

Charged by the artist’s childhood experiences of war, violence, brutality, and physical entrapment during the collapse of her native Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Bašić’s humanoid sculptures address sweeping themes of intergenerational trauma, post-humanist feminism, and the quest for immortality, but these far-reaching subjects are refracted through the disarmingly tender bodies in her work, clinging to support structures such as pipes and prosthetics that hold them in place.