Visual Art
Protein for the babies
This film centres on the bean water my mother used to keep me alive during the Bosnian War, a substitute for breast milk when stress stopped her own. The film uses montage to bind together the quiet gestures of preparing this broth in a London kitchen with fragments of the Bosnian landscapes my family moved through when the war began. It cuts through video of my mother teaching me to make Burek, a traditional Bosnian dish. Contemporary recordings of my family’s voices drift into the sequence out of sync with the images, creating deliberate dislocation. Through these ruptures, the work lets survival, memory, and domestic ritual collide, allowing me to inhabit the past.
100 things that go first
I pluck a pigeon rehearsing a gesture I hope I will never need. In another video, I eat bone broth, whispering “za baku, za dedu,” the words my mother used to say to encourage us to take another bite of food as children. During the Siege of Sarajevo, people trapped and ate pigeons when food disappeared, I take myself there. A slowed voice lists the objects that vanish first in conflict, each word stretched forcing the viewer to strain to hear. As feathers fall, the act becomes a quiet confrontation with inherited memory suspended between past necessity and a present that hopes never to repeat it.
The other work
I always knew my father as a doctor, but as refugees in Canada, he delivered KFC to survive. The medical bag that defined him became a relic, and he took on other jobs. In this video, I go through his old medical kit and play the footage in reverse. The images run forward with the doctor’s oath, then play upside down with fast-food recipe. I’m trying to understand that shift, not as tragedy or heroism, but as what happens when a life is uprooted.
Like mother
I make bean water, the drink women made during the war in Bosnia when they could not produce milk for infants. No recipe. No instruction. Just instinct. This work explores a quiet inheritance between women: the knowledge that appears in crisis, the improvisation of care, the body’s refusal to surrender. I brew the beans and drink them from a coffee mug, replacing the drink of life and placing it into ritual. What was once survival becomes ceremony. What was once absence becomes continuation.
Floi
Floi is an immersive audio installation that sonifies the health of Scotland’s peatlands. Using environmental data gathered by Peatland Action during a forest-to-bog restoration project in Dumfries and Galloway, the work translates metrics such as pH, water temperature and dissolved oxygen into sound.Each speaker emits the call of a species native to the site: natterjack toad, red grouse, stag, curlew, merlin falcon, which emerges only when conditions are within optimal ranges. Crescendos of animal calls and moments of silence render ecological vitality and fragility audible. As new data is gathered, Floi continues to evolve, bringing a remote landscape into the urban spaces where climate policy is shaped.