A collage featuring black-and-white photos with faces obscured, labelled with years, and a text page in the Bosnian language as one headline reads "Šta ti želiš?" on a black background.
Cut-out words arranged on a white background in a ransom note style, featuring letters in different fonts and sizes forming an incomplete text.
Cracked concrete pavement in Sarajevo with grenade holes.
Collage featuring a headline in Bosnian language, with images of streets, people, damaged building facade, and the years 1991 and 2021 on mirror reflections.
Wooden door frame next to hexagonal patterned glass with traces of a taped-up bullet hole in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Collage with a rough concrete texture and a small plant growing out of a metal pipe, featuring text in Bosnian and a date "20 Oct 2021."
Black and white collage with text in the Bosnian language, containing cut-out squares resembling facade marks from grenades and a newspaper print element with vertical orientation mentioning the recent war in the Balkans during the '90s.

EMIGRATION: True Fairytale, The Ultimate Goal/ISELJAVANJE: Stvarna bajka, krajnji cilj (2021)

Collage. Scanned yearbook and newspaper images.

The collage takes the form of a newspaper spread exploring the theme of youth mass migration from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Visually and contextually divided, the spread features a stark contrast between its two sides: one black, the other white - a divide that echoes the opposing realities of those who leave and those who stay behind.

The left side represents those who have left the country, using scanned yearbook portraits of the artist's high school classmates. These images are arranged like obituaries, with years beneath them marking when each person emigrated. In contrast, the right side shows a colour photograph of someone who remains — a person suspended in an idle society. Accompanying the image is an article* in which they express a desire to leave.

Every word in the spread has been meticulously crafted from individual letters and syllables cut from newspapers. This labour-intensive process symbolises the fragmented, painstaking effort it often takes to realise and articulate — let alone achieve — the wish to migrate.

*The article is available to read in both Bosnian and English.

back to gallery | EMIGRATION: True fairytale, The ultimate goal (2021)