Brankiça Zilović

Brankiça Zilović is a graduate of ENSBA, where she attended the workshops of Vladimir Veličković and Dominique Gauthier. Embroidery and the world of textiles have gradually imposed themselves on her practice to become her exclusive mediums. Her work is marked by the history of Serbia and the broader issues of migration and borders, combining individual and collective biography.

She sews, weaves, and embroiders, and creates installations, compositions, and drawings. Oblivion, loss and degeneration, the driving forces behind Brankiça’s work, are calling for new beginnings. Through repetition and obsession, time dilates and takes on an expiatory dimension, by replacing memory with the mechanization of gesture.

In 2023, Private Choice presents Brankiça Zilović at the Pour l’amour de l’Antique exhibition designed by Olivier Morand in Cavaillon, at the Puyricard d’Agar mansion. Greek mythology appears in Brankiça’s work as a new way of questioning our memory, our values, and our relationship with the world. By choosing the figures of Venus, Athena and Janus, the artist reveals the classical attributes of the gods and their unifying power in a colorful weave.

Her Retour à Ithaque series is a part of a desire to map shaken territories. The maiden voyage of Ulysses survives in our collective imagination as an exploration where many pitfalls had to be avoided. Through her embroidery on paperbacks, the artist tells the missions that belong to us today, relating to environmental emergencies: the alarming situation of Antarctica is at the heart of the artist’s reflections. On her open books, the silhouettes of various countries are outlined in textile. Like islands from the same archipelago, their identical format reflects their mutual destiny, inevitably linked to the Arctic Circle.