Ivana Bašić and the Future of Flesh
Ivana Bašić sculpts figures that have not chosen yet between arriving and leaving. Wax stands in for flesh, blown glass keeps a breath after the mouth has gone, steel holds a body up and can cut it down. The work comes from Belgrade as a country came apart, from New York after 2010, and from a long argument that dust and respiration belong in the materials list. In September that work stands outdoors in London.
The last analog technology we still carry is breath. Museums spend 2026 asking what a “new human” might be and answering with machines. Ivana Bašić answers with lungs, wax and dust.
She was born in Belgrade in 1986, in a country that would soon stop existing. She has lived in New York since 2010. She trained in Belgrade, then at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she completed an MPS in 2012. As a child she did not treat her body as identity. She treated it as a space she inhabited, limited and temporary. The collapse of Yugoslavia, she has said, did not invent that feeling. It made the limit visible. Flesh could fail. Nations could fail.
Artists her age who talk about the post-human usually mean silicon. Bašić built a material language and kept it for more than a decade. Wax is flesh, paraffin drawn from petroleum, itself the residue of bodies already returned to soil. Blown glass is breath made solid. Stainless steel holds a body up and can cut it down. Stone is organic life under compression, waiting to become powder. Bronze is armor. Breath, pressure, weight and torsion appear in her captions as materials. “It would be much easier to use resin or plastic,” she told Plaster Magazine, “but these materials are the truth.”
In 2016 the Whitney Museum put her in Dreamlands. The work was SOMA, begun in 2013 from a forensic 3D scan of her own body: sculpture, animation, a purchasable avatar offered in the spirit of Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0. The museum acquired related works in 2018. The collapsed figure of SOMA, folded as if it were being born and unmade at once, kept returning in later pieces.
The rooms grew. The machines started keeping time with her breath. Through the hum of black velvet sleep, at Marlborough Contemporary in New York in 2017, already used electromagnetic hammers to grind alabaster into dust. Nicolas Bourriaud placed her in Crash Test at La Panacée in Montpellier in 2018. Her first fully institutional solo, Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics, opened at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin in 2024. At its center stood a seven-metre animatronic altarpiece, years in the making. Pink glass enclosed a core of alabaster. Pneumatic hammers, timed to her recorded breath, struck the stone. Microphones carried the blows through the room. Bašić has said the piece looks back to seventeenth-century Italian images of the Immaculate Heart. Here the heart is a mineral being reduced to powder.
Solos followed in 2025 at MO.CO. in Montpellier, MOCA Belgrade, Francesca Minini in Milan and Albion Jeune in London. At Minini, Fantasy vanishes in flesh brought white-bronze reliefs with halos, watercolors from the Ungrounding series, and the long-limbed figure titled, after Clarice Lispector, I had seen the centuries, and the vast dry lands; I had reached the nothing and the nothing was living and moist. Several of her titles lift almost whole sentences from The Passion According to G.H., the novel in which a woman meets the living nothing inside a cockroach and does not look away. Reza Negarestani sits on the same shelf. In that philosophy dust is the world reduced until every particle still holds a complete idea of matter.
The 14th Taipei Biennial gave the thought a public scale. Metanoia (2025), made with Saba Mahdavi and Sur-Mesure Engineering Studio, took the Stone Flower Spomenik at Jasenovac and recast it as a breathing machine: concrete petals, race-car exhaust manifolds, glass vessels that inhale and exhale, a copper heart with a core of breath and dust. Yugoslavia and Taiwan are separate histories. Bašić does not collapse them. She works the shared hunger for unity after fracture.
That argument has just passed through New York. New Humans: Memories of the Future, the exhibition that reopened the expanded New Museum under Massimiliano Gioni, placed Bašić inside a century-long inventory of altered bodies, prostheses and dreams of upgrade. The rooms around her spoke fluently about AI, avatars and uploaded mind. Her work stayed with moisture, weight and ending.
In September Metanoia leaves the museum and goes outdoors. It will stand in The Regent’s Park for Frieze Sculpture 2026, from 16 September to 1 November, in an edition curated by Fatoş Üstek. A work built on breath and pressure will have to hold its own among trees, weather and passing bodies.
The Minini exhibition last autumn confirmed how firmly the work sits in Italy. The figures filled the room without flattening into design. They asked for time, which is consistent with a practice built by hand, over years, and now moving through museums on both sides of the Atlantic. Next come Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in March 2027 and Tank in Shanghai in July.
Writers reach for horror. Bašić has refused that reading. To call the interior of the body horror, she argued in Spike, is to admit that we cannot stand what we are made of. She keeps choosing the harder register: wax that looks like marble, steel that looks like bone, a hammer keeping time with a lung.
Selected exhibitions
Recent exhibitions include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2026) and the 14th Taipei Biennial, TFAM (2025).
Solo exhibitions include MOCA Belgrade (2025); MO.CO Montpellier Contemporain (2025); Francesca Minini, Milan (2025); Albion Jeune, London (2025); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2024); François Ghebaly, New York (2022); Marlborough Contemporary, New York (2017).
Group exhibitions include the New Museum, New York (2026); 14th Taipei Biennial, TFAM (2025); Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (2025); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2023); National Gallery, Prague (2021); Museum of Art+Design, Miami (2020); Contemporary Art Museum Estonia, Tallinn (2019); NEW Forum, Düsseldorf (2019); Athens Biennial (2018); Belgrade Biennial (2018); Künstlerhaus, Graz (2018); Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art (2016).
