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Meet the Modern Nomad Artists from Berlin's Serbinale

From 'it' girls to multinational punk bands, Serbian artists reflect on their life in migration at the Serbinale.
The design from this years festival

The word of 2015 is “migrants”: refugees, asylum seekers—whatever term you use, people are fleeing their homelands for new places, looking for nothing more than safety and a dignified life. For the past 20 years, the people of the Balkans have shared migrants’ fates, fleeing from devastating wars, poverty, and a repressive political regime.

Germany has become a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of people from Serbia. Even those who have managed to overcome the bureaucratic challenges, however, are facing problems forming new identities and integrating into their new environments. Migrations, immigrants’ integration, and coexistence with different cultures in German society are the main themes for this year’s Serbinale, a festival of new art from Serbia, organized in Berlin, titled Modern Nomads.

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The main exhibition deals with identity in the contemporary society, especially that of those who don’t live in their states of birth. Participating artists' works focus on trying to live in countries where they are foreigners; by examining administrative issues that limit them in their movement and creativity. Large questions include: Is dignity defined with a passport? Is migration a necessity, choice, or something else? How does the life of modern nomads look nowadays? What have they have lost?

Sanja Lukjačenko, fashion designer. Photo courtesy the designer

"I feel very stationed here in Berlin. And then I realized that, lately, I have been feeling too stationed, like that nomad has awakened inside me," says Sanja Lukjačenko, fashion designer, supermodel, and it girl from Serbia who spoke on the panel. “Necessity or choice: migrations and identity."

Lukjačenko left Serbia 15 years ago. "I’ve never thought I would become a nomad, I didn’t think about that much as we lived in an isolated and sanctioned system." Everyone was dreaming of “escaping prison,” she added, “to live and go further without feeling repressed and living under the state of constant conflict, to join the world that has been changing so fast. But I also couldn’t imagine a more important place to be, with all things happening in Serbia: wars, NATO bombings, street protests and finally, Milosevic’s fall,” Lukjačenko said.

For artist Ivan Boskovic, Milosevic’s ouster was also a sign to leave Serbia. His participative performance, Home Migrations, is based on psycho-geography and metaphysics, an address to the migratory birds in all of us. Upon the call of professor Katharine Sieverding, Boskovic came to Berlin in 2001 for art studies. Going to Germany was relatively easy, but staying there was not.

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"Ongoing requests to extend my visa every three months were hell. I was met with sentences like ‘If you don’t pass your exams, you will have to leave our country,’" he said. Boskovic finally got his residence permit. He wonders whether he would remain foreign forever, always being the other. Although he has realized that parallel identities are not a bad thing, he feels more foreign in Belgrade now. “Being an immigrant, a foreigner, the other in cosmopolitan Berlin is not difficult."

"Waiting for a Visa", 2000, by Tanja Ostojic

One of the most prominent performance artists from Serbia, Tanja Ostojic has been living abroad for years. Her works focus on feminism, migrations, and discrimination of certain social groups. She presented her 2000 serial Crossing Borders, dedicated to EU elitism and the problems she has faced as someone holding a Serbian passport. "Since my visa request was rejected, I decided to perform an illegal border crossing act (from Slovenia) in order to take part in an international artistic workshop in Austria,” said Ostojic.

In June of 2000, she returned from Austria through an out-of-use local border crossing in the mountains, unregistered by officials. That same year, she had a “Waiting for a Visa” performance in front of the Austrian embassy, queuing from 6 AM with 300 people seeking visas. Both actions were documented with video stills and photos and exhibited during Serbinale.

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Jovana Popić. Photo by Alexander Koch

Multimedia artist Jovana Popic moved to Berlin in 2003, when Serbia’s first democratically-elected Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was assassinated in a broad daylight in Belgrade. “After all that happened in Serbia during the 1990s, the events I took part in together with my family surrounding his death affected me personally,"she said. "That same year, in 2003, I realized that my life calling was to be an artist, not a hostage obsessed almost exclusively with political events.”

Actress and singer Jelena Kuljic heads a multinational punk jazz band KUU!, whose concert completed the Serbinale. “When I came to Berlin, I realized that freedom to discover yourself and remain firm to yourself was the only way to fulfill yourself both intimately and professionaly. This is so obvious, but in Serbia’s conditions, it is often incomprehensible and impossible to realize,” she said. “There is no passport that gives dignity, but more a booklet reminding us to unjust differences between people related to their place of birth. For me, migration was an absolute necessity that salvation in the fight against spiritual poverty.”

Jelena Kuljić and KUU! Photo by Wolfgang Siesing

The Serbinale took place in Berlin from September 11 to September 13. Click here for more information.

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