Bosnia and Herzegovina
https://bojanavidekanic.com/
Bojana Videkanic is an artist, curator and an art historian born in Bosnia and Herzegovina/former Yugoslavia. After becoming a stateless person, she came to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee in 1995.
Videkanic is an Assistant Professor of contemporary art and visual culture in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo, Ontario Canada. Her art historical research focuses on the 20th-century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms through Yugoslavia’s participation in the Non-Aligned Movement and various de-colonial cultural practices. Her book Nonaligned Modernism: socialist postcolonial practices in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985 was published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2019. Videkanic has also written about contemporary artists coming from the region, most recently about Tanja Ostojić’s seven-year long project Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić which deals with recent cultural and socio-economic histories of the post-Yugoslav region from a feminist perspective.
Her current research investigates memorial sites of the Non-Aligned Movement, in particular architecture and monuments built to commemorate each NAM summit. Her artistic practice is based mostly in performance art, but Videkanic also works in video, text and installation. Her work mines personal experiences of displacement, movement, and identity as these intersect with larger political, social and cultural questions. Her most recent work deals with the transformation of her native country into a lawless zone for the development of various neo-liberal capitalist projects and new forms of colonization.
Videkanic is a board member of 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival in Toronto, and sat on boards of galleries and artist-run centres. She has presented her work nationally and internationally at performance festivals such as Nuit Blanche Toronto, 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival Toronto, MS:T International Festival from Calgary, Hemispherica, Montreal, IPA Platform and Workshop, Bristol, IMAFestival, Serbia.
