Hana Miletić, Materials, 2021, hand-woven textile (butter yellow peace silk, lemon yellow flax and white organic raw wool)

Hana Miletić

Departing from a background in documentary photography, and inspired by the long tradition of handwork in her family, Hana Miletić has developed a distinct artistic language based mainly on the creation of hand-woven textile works. In her practice Miletić reflects on issues of representation and social reproduction, by making linkages between photography and weaving. The artist models her hand-woven textiles after her photographs that document repairs in public space. These repairs both represent marks of transformation and gestures of care. Focusing on community structures and social interactions, Miletić artistic practice touches upon the consequences of political and economic change. In this, Miletić sees the weaving process – which requires considerable time and dedication – as a way to counteract certain social forces at work, such as acceleration, standardization and transparency; as well as a way to consciously deal with the encountered conditions of transformation.

Hana Miletić, XX, exhibition view at LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina, Kosovo, 2021

Hana Miletić, XX, exhibition view at Statements with LambdaLambdaLambda, Art Basel, 2021

“XX’s conceptual framework mines the structure of weaving. The Basel and Pristina exhibitions are polar points, integral but opposed, which provide the tense structure for the ‘warp and weft’ constitutive of XX’s overarching meaning. To put this another way, the displacement or exclusion of Switzerland within the Basel exhibition you stand in – overtaken by material and daily rhythm from Pristina – is achieved through employment of this dual structure. Like the warp beneath the weft, Basel isn’t obliterated in the scene of the present exhibition, nor ignored in an attempt to perform the importance of the subordinated state, but excluded while shown in its constitutive interdependence, or as inseparable from its relation to Kosovo. More broadly, XX suggests the impossibility of any “developed” economy without that of the “transitional”, breaking both down to another kind of abstract duality (XX), which is contrasted using material evidence, in faithful copies, of the ordinary sameness – yet striking separation – between the two as physical sites.”

- E.C. Feiss

Hana Miletić, Soft Ties, exhibition view at Basement Roma, 2022

Courtesy of the artist, LambdaLambdaLambda (Prishtina/Brussels) and The Approach (London)

“Her works activate several methods of seeing-the photographic image, the haptic, the hand weaving, the object standing, the work presenting itself, the wall activating a background. But also the colors she uses are very particular, creating some sort of illusion of conceptual centers that resonate with certain histories of art and materials that are linked with a memory of politics. Her works intentionally erase any literal reference to the public space that constitutes their origin. And yet they arrange themselves as a sort of main square with the ambition of touching us and make us create an assembly. Her works intend to create sculptural environments where the perpetual self-critique of past systems gets replaced by the possibility of a self-renewal force emerging from immediate touch and care. Have we really outgrown the dilemmas that arise with the dream of a life in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all? I do not think so. And therefore it is so important to invent through juxtaposing and capturing the material realities of the world with the visceral feeling of acceleration and compression, social conflict, and cultural upheaval that define the current urban and non-urban existence. With its focus on materials, Hana Miletić’s work also manages to produce strangely physical dream images and ghostly appearances. Memory politics and the mental environments they create are the focus of her work, motivated by the transformations that originated after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but not only. The contemporary transformation of metropolitan and rural areas worldwide under neoliberal siege and digital triumphalism raises questions about the earlier development of metropolitan experience in its relationship to certain media, industrial production and, today, digital dissemination. The work of Hana Miletić is not interested in bringing any of those past imaginations back to life. She is, above all, interested in the permanent negotiation between the visual, the haptic, the verbal, and the ancestral which was already constitutive of certain abandoned traditions in 20th-century modernism and which has reached a new crescendo in today’s exercise of recovering certain feminist art practices. Her work is unapologetically about an artist aware of this genderized way of looking at languages and media, intimacy and space, big and small narratives.”

- Chuz Martinez, CURA. 37, 2021, p.257

Hana Miletić was born in Zagreb (1982), she lives and works in Brussels. Solo exhibitions at MUDAM in Luxemburg, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMSU) in Rijeka, and Kunsthalle Mainz are planned for 2022, as well as a group show at MAXXI L’Aquila. Her most recent solo exhibitions were Patchy at Bergen Kunsthall (2021), Mistik at La Loge in Brussels (2021), and Dependencies at WIELS in Brussels (2018). Her work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including the Belgrade Biennial (2021), Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (2021), Kunsthalle Wien (2020), Kunstverein Hannover (2020), Metro Pictures in New York (2019), S.M.A.K. in Ghent (2018-19) and the13th Sharjah Biennial (2017).

Miletić was a resident at Van Eyck in Maastricht (2014-2015), and at Thread, the cultural centre of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Senegal (2019). In 2021 Miletić was awarded the Baloise Art Prize.