Velma Babić works across photography, video, performance, drawing, sound, and spatial practice. 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 minimal 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 symbol, her works remain attentive to how historical violence, displacement, and social inscription shape bodily presence and human experience.
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. Her biography unfolds across multiple geographies, including Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, and the United States — experiences that continue to inform her sensitivity toward fragmentation, continuity, migration, and the persistence of embodied memory.
Landscapes, abandoned architectures, transitional zones, and temporary installations function less as backgrounds than as active spatial conditions that absorb, fracture, and continuously reshape the figure within them. Materials, sound, and spatial interventions operate not as symbols, but as subtle carriers of tension, atmospheric residue, and unresolved presence.
At the same time, drawing traces what precedes language and resists direct articulation.
Drawing on her background in literary studies, Babić approaches these conditions with close attention to silence, structure, and the instability of meaning. Her works operate with reduced means — minimal in form, yet dense in implication — remaining attentive not only to rupture and violence, but also to the persistent human impulse to endure, reassemble meaning, and continue.