Isak Berbic

Isak Berbic, American, born in Bosnia, 1983. In the 1990’s when Yugoslavia disintegrated and Sarajevo was under siege, he and his family escaped from the war to Croatia, lived in a refugee camp in Denmark, and received political asylum in the United States.Isak Berbic studied art at the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, and at University of Illinois at Chicago, where he completed his MFA.
Isak Berbic is an artist primarily working with photography, moving image and performance. His recent artworks reimagine popular narratives, crossing them with social and personal histories, often appropriating anecdotes and myths, politics and contemporary issues, environmental and economic ecologies, art history, cooking, migration, humor, tragedy, the global circulation of images and the limits of representation. Reflecting on contested histories, he uses fiction and documents, found and primary material, exploring the image and the literary in the construction of his pieces. His work takes on different forms of presentation, including image-text-object installations, photographic prints, videos, actions, texts and publications.