Nina Komel

Through humor and irony, Nina Komel examines the position of an artist and art in Bosnia and Herzegovina as an anomaly in a system that fragments the geopolitical, social, economical, and ethnic sphere. Using assemblage strategies Komel plays with the colloquial language, bureaucracy, and found objects as signifiers of shifting values and economies as a method to intertwine personal, micro, and macro politics.

Charting Absurd is an exhibition curated by Nataša Prljević. Shaped as a diagram, this interactive multimedia installation is comprised of text, objects and sound, and attempts to systematize absurdities into a cohesive whole. Komel uses the exhibition as a ritual, casting her own ear and turning it into a receiver and emitter of an irrational chart used as a testament to everyday navigation of imposed cultural and societal mechanisms.

The work has been produced during her two-month residency at Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn that Komel received as the winner of the Zvono Award organized by Sarajevo Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Residency Unlimited, New York, and support from The Trust for Mutual Understanding. Residency Unlimited is grateful to partner with IDIO Gallery, Brooklyn based contemporary art gallery and performance space that has been focused on experimental work across media with critical engagement.

Nina Komel is a conceptual artist whose work is based on documenting and emphasizing the absurd state of everyday interactions and value systems in Bosnia and Herzegovina that occupy both personal and public experience. Focusing on the state of isolation Komel works in a range of media, from text to immersive interactive installations using visual and non-visual language. Using transformation through irony she recognizes the accumulation of contradictions in a current state of the culture and the pressure it imposes on the artist and the citizen. She lives in Bosanski Brod, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Nina Komel is the recipient of the prestigious Zvono Award, organized by Sarajevo Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Residency Unlimited, New York, and supported from The Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Nataša Prljević is currently a curatorial intern at RU. She is a multimedia artist from Serbia, based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work employs collage, installation, and video with a focus on mechanisms of real and imagined sites of memory as a consequence of displacement. She holds a BFA from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia and MFA from the interdisciplinary Art and Design program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2015, she received the Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. In 2014 she was awarded the Rackham International Student Fellowship/ Chia-Lun Lo Fellowship at the University of Michigan.