Ivana Bašić: “These materials are the truth”

Ivana Basic’s exhibition tour took place at Albion Jeune gallery at 8.30 am. It’s an unholy hour for most who ride the art circuit, and certainly isn’t an hour you’d expect to transcend all earthly and bodily matter – but these things sneak up on you.

I first saw the Serbian-born, New York-based artist’s work at the Prague National Gallery in 2021. I remember a pallid body – headless, armless and footless – suspended from the ceiling like rotting meat in an abattoir. The flesh seemed bruised, beaten down by the world. Now I know that the damage to its surface was not from external force, but from the attempts of something within trying to break free. It also wasn’t an incomplete body, missing limbs or a head; it was complete, like every other representation of the body in the history of art, just a different version of it.

Ivana has an infectiously calm energy. She does not seem to speak small talk – two sips of coffee in and we’re on Gnosticism. We approach the first sculpture, a partial body affixed to the wall. Its title is Pneumatic Positions II: Blossoming (2024). It’s bending backwards, like it’s surrendering – to orgasm or expiration, who knows. Ivana has recently become obsessed with Pneumatics – the highest, most enlightened order of Gnosticism, a collection of ideas and beliefs that arose among early Christian sects. The pneumatics, unlike the hylics (the lowest rung of the Gnostic ladder), were powered by the ‘breath of life’, a spirit that transcends the material realm.

This interest in escaping the body’s limitations began during Ivana’s childhood, during which she experienced the hellish collapse of Yugoslavia. “I lived straight through that. This full on collapse of the nation, of the culture, of the currency, of absolutely every single aspect of reality. As you’re growing into the world, it’s a really crazy thing to witness,” she recalls. “It was this feeling of collapse that is just coming closer and closer to you.” Things came to a head in 1999 when Nato launched a series of aerial bombings in response to the humanitarian crisis and escalating violence in the Kosovo region. A 13-year-old Ivana and her family were forced to hide in an air raid shelter for 78 days. “I understood that I was contained in matter, but I was not just matter. If my body perishes, I will perish together with it.”

Ivana studied graphic design in Belgrade. “There was no art in Serbia at the time. Museums were closed for 20 years, and people were just trying to survive,” she recalls. “When I finished my studies, I sat with my professors and looked at all my work. It was just bodies everywhere. Clearly, I had some kind of fixation, and it wasn’t going away.”

She moved to New York City to study at the Tisch School Of The Arts. “I went to this totally weird technology school, which I thought was an art school, but because I didn’t know anything, I ended up with programming nerds who were making robots.” She took classes in anthropology and philosophy at Steinhardt and “escaped into materials.” In retrospect, she’s glad she didn’t do art school. “I think I would have had so many more insecurities about what I’m doing. I would have questioned way more. I didn’t know any of the skills or how to use the materials. I was using them in a way that felt very intuitive.”

Over the last 12 years, Ivana has been developing a material codex, used in works like Blossoming and some of the other sculptures in the room, abject reductions of the bodies in what appear to be various stages of metamorphosis. They are so meticulously rendered I imagine they might peel themselves off the wall and into my fragile psyche at any moment. I scan through the materials: bronze and copper (recent additions to her repertoire); steel in the form of race-car exhaust manifolds, which are “the support but also the violence”. Steatite stone (“It’s so intestinal”) rupturing from within white wax – both representing flesh; blown glass to evoke breath and fragility. Breath itself is also listed as a material. “It would be much easier to use resin or plastic, but these materials are the truth”, says Ivana.

Despite the futuristic appearance of her work, Ivana seems to work more like an artist of the Renaissance, poring over raw materials, whittling down ideas, tinkering and tweaking. The results are the product of many failures. “I push the materials to their limits,” she says, admitting that she can’t always be friends with her materials. There are arguments and negotiations to be had in a process that often involves months of clay modelling before the final sculptures can be realised. “I don’t feel like I made them. I feel like they just exist. They’re on the other side, I just let them through,” she says. “It’s such a struggle. It’s quite agonising, actually, because you’re struggling with your ego, and your mind, and you really need to surpass both of those to allow something bigger to come in. That is a war. It’s only when you bypass yourself that the work can actually come in”, she says.

I know I should have reached a more enlightened level by now, but there are two elephants in the room that I feel compelled to address: the apparent gaping vagina and pendulous testicles on Blossoming. “I am focusing on a higher plane,” she says. “For me it’s too particular to discuss the specifics of each body, because we all suffer from the same condition. And I think this is actually the beauty of humanity. I’m not interested in the differentiation – I am interested in the truth that cuts to the core of being human.”

Although Ivana’s work does share some surface traits with a certain uneasy biomechanical ‘thing’ prevalent in contemporary art today – akin to works by Jes Fan, Hannah Levy, Pakui Hardware, Anna Uddenberg and Mire Lee, or, looking back a bit, Berlinde de Bruyckere and Louise Bourgeois – we’re not operating on a surface level. It really doesn’t matter what it looks like. “I try to preserve myself from the influences”, she says. “I don’t look at too much art. I try to not take in things that I feel like are maybe similar to me or might affect me. People will say what they want to say, but that has nothing to do with your path.”

But she isn’t severed from external influences. She likes reading non-fiction (“I want to go to the source”). Although she consumes very little fiction (because it’s “interpretation”), she enjoys reading between the lines of authors like Nabokov (“He just has some of these sentences where he will pierce straight through reality and go on to the other side”). She also references Catherine Malabou’s Ontology of the Accident. I’d seen this in the press release, which describes how the essay “posits the transformation into Otherness as the only choice available when physical flight has become impossible”. I’ll be honest, that was all a bit much for my morning brain, but we’ve come a long way since then. Essentially, it’s about metamorphosis; a bodily and psychic response to extreme trauma – like war, grief or other catastrophes, that freezes the body and blocks its ability to escape. Ergo a new being is born, existing alongside the original persona, a new self with the potential to flee earthly constraints.

What’s interesting about a show like this, about ideas like this, is how at odds they seem with the general mood of culture. People are more obsessed with their own matter than ever: shrinking it with Ozempic, pumping it with muscle mass, plumping it with botox, extending its longevity with the latest quackfest elixir, photographing it from all angles, selling it on OnlyFans – and spending lots of time, energy and Instagram characters critiquing everyone else’s. “I think humanity is suffering more and more from anxiety, trying to control the uncontrollable”, says Ivana. “It’s in a very strange mental space. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good one. I feel it, especially in New York, you’re almost shamed if you don’t have Botox. It’s really crazy. We’re all dependent on the phones, because that is immaterial existence, yet it’s just being harnessed for profit. And you’re being enslaved by your urge to escape the body.”

Ivana did once escape her body. Well, she split it in half. In 2013, she made a virtual self for a project called SOMA, an exact replica of her earthly version; every pore, hair follicle and bodily crease, available online to be purchased. In Marina Abramović Rhythm 0– style, she told people they could do whatever they wanted to her avatar, so long as they documented the process. Sure, this was about commodification of the body, and the horrors of identity exploitation in technology (more reality than concept with AI developments today), but it was also about a freeing of the earthly self, a sense that physical limitations can, with the right methods, be transcended. “Technology for me is just a tool, and beyond that, it’s just really alienating,” she says. “I think this whole ideology around it is just really misguided.”

When the high of the show wears off, I return to my status as anonymous desk flesh, propped up by ergonomics and pixels. After spinning through the washing machine of existentialism a few times, I do feel one step closer to an alternative perspective, one less claustrophobic and concerned with silly stuff like the mortal body. “One thing I will take credit for is that I have managed to self erase,” says Ivana. On the way out, I notice the fine drifts of marble dust encircling the sculptures. One day, it will all just be dust. In the meantime, let’s all just get over ourselves.