Velma Babić works across photography, video, performance, drawing, sound, and spatial installation. Using her own body as material and spatial presence, particularly in performance and photography, she develops works through gesture, repetition, and the unstable relation between body, space, and perception.
Her practice unfolds through reduced actions — covering, carrying, sweeping, obscuring — repeated until bodily presence itself begins to shift between visibility and disappearance, resistance and vulnerability. Bodies appear fragmented, partially concealed, absorbed into landscapes, reduced to traces, or suspended within temporary spatial situations. Rather than approaching the body as a stable identity or fixed symbol, her works remain attentive to how historical experience, displacement, and social conditions become inscribed within bodily presence and spatial relations.
Rooted in the historical aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, her work engages with the fragile entanglement of personal and collective histories without reducing them to direct representation. Born in Hamburg, raised in former Yugoslavia / Bosnia and Herzegovina, and now based in Munich, her biography unfolds across multiple geographies, including Colombia and the United States — experiences that continue to inform her sensitivity toward fragmentation, continuity, migration, and the persistence of embodied memory.
Landscapes, transitional zones, and temporary structures function less as backgrounds than as active spatial conditions that absorb, fracture, and continuously reshape the figure within them. Sound and material interventions extend the work beyond visibility, creating unstable relations between bodily presence, memory, distance, and spatial tension.
At the same time, drawing becomes a space in which personal and historical experience condense into reduced and often ambiguous visual forms. Emerging from reflections on fragility, displacement, and states of social instability, these works do not unfold narratively but through reduction, repetition, erasure, and material tension.
Her works operate with reduced means — minimal in form, yet attentive to fragility, endurance, persistence, and the traces that remain within bodies, materials, and space.