ABOUT
Ivana Keser
Ivana Keser is engaged in multimedia art, essayism, performance, photography, film, artistic research. She took her MFA in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, class of Đuro Seder (1992). She received PhD in film studies (2009), at the Postgraduate study of literature, performing arts, film and culture at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Since 2010 she has been on the faculty of the Academy, in the New Media department. She also teaches at the Music Academy in Zagreb, she lectured at the Postgraduate studies at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb and University North (Koprivnica).
Work
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Performance
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Community Art
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OUR WORK
Selected Work
Ivana Keser’s work unfolds across photography, prints, drawings, video and large-scale exhibition pieces, moving between media as freely as it moves between ideas. Rather than settling into a single form, her practice treats each medium as another way of looking — at landscape, at memory, at the quiet structures that hold a place together. The works gathered here are drawn from across that range, offering a way into a practice that has developed over decades of making, teaching and research.
Recurring throughout is an attention to the natural world and the specific places it inhabits — the trees, forests and landscapes of Croatia appear not as backdrops but as subjects in their own right, observed closely and returned to again and again. Alongside the images runs a current of inquiry: Keser is as much an essayist and researcher as she is an artist, and her projects often begin as questions before they become objects. What you see in this selection is only a fragment of that ongoing conversation between image and idea. To follow it further — through exhibition works, prints, photography, drawings and video — explore the complete collection, where the connections between individual pieces and longer bodies of work come into clearer view.
Performance
Performance Art as part of my Life
Performance has long been part of Ivana Keser’s practice, and often a collaborative one. As one third of the informal group XXXL — alongside Tomislav Gotovac and Aleksandar Battista Ilić — she helped develop works that move out of the gallery and into the landscape, where the body, the camera and the terrain become equal participants. Cinema is never far away: these performances borrow the language of film — its choreography, its commands, its group movements — and replay it on the slopes of a mountain or across open ground, somewhere between homage and quiet subversion.
What holds the work together is duration and attention rather than spectacle. A project like Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill stretched across ten years of Sundays on Mount Medvednica, accumulating thousands of self-timed photographs in a sustained action carried out, for the most part, without an audience. Meaning was never fixed: shown in Croatia, Ireland, Switzerland, Spain and Japan, the same gestures could read as de-ideologized and personal or as sharply political, depending on who was looking. To perform here is to mark a place at the margins — to insist on presence, repetition and the slow passage of time. The works below trace that ongoing engagement between film, body and ground.
Community Art
Art as part of the Community
Running through Ivana Keser’s practice is a conviction that art belongs not only to the gallery but to the community around it. For more than a decade she co-directed Community Art — an NGO active from 2000 to 2014, founded with Aleksandar Battista Ilić — which treated art as an agent of personal, institutional and collective transformation. Its work resisted easy categories, moving across research, education and public life to question inherited patterns in urbanism, ecology, economics, the media and art itself, and to open up other ways of perceiving and organizing the world we share.
In practice, this meant a remarkable breadth of activity: collaborative artworks and performances, lectures and round tables, urban interventions and billboards, publications, broadcasts and nature-based projects, alongside initiatives like The School of Missing Studies. The roots reach back further still — to EgoEast (1992), where Keser and four fellow artists gathered forty-five participants at Zagreb’s Art Pavilion and staged public debates to connect a fragmented scene, first locally and then across Eastern Europe. What links these projects is an insistence on dialogue, participation and the slow building of community. The works gathered here follow that thread — explore them to see how art, here, becomes something made and shared together.