Belgrade Art Studio is delighted to welcome a visual artist based in Nashville USA, Alena Mehic for the September 2018 residency in Belgrade.

Alena was born in Bosnia during the war in 1995 and immigrated to the United States in 1997. She graduated from Middle Tennessee State University with a BFA in May of 2017 (focus in painting and printmaking).

Her research focuses on the history of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and public opinion of it – both by the United States and ex-Yugoslavs. Alena’s drawings and paintings focus on displacement, incongruity, and nostalgia. This body of work stems from her status as an immigrant, and leads her to constantly try to reconcile her dual cultural identities. The contrast between Yugo-nostalgia and vehement repudiation of the allegedly authoritarian state fascinates her, and inspires her to create work that conveys the absence of absolute truth within both of these attitudes. By creating multi-layer color lithographs that mimic propaganda pamphlets and borrow from both Yugoslav culture as well as American anti-communist media, she seeks to evoke a sense of sensationalism, discomfort, or creeping fear.