Vanja Vukovic

Urban life seems to consist of infinite possibilities and open spaces. Everyday life, however, consists of routine and habits. The enchantment that is hidden in every encounter and every scene often remains undiscovered. My current work intends to evoke those sudden brief moments of strangeness and enchantment once more. Fantasy, dreams, seconds of irrationality are provoked by the artificial addition of objects such as balloons, sheets of paper, and clouds – seemingly familiar objects from the history of art and the contemporary of art. Something is recognized and becomes unrecognisable at the same moment.

In the photo series "Plastic Invader", which was mainly created in Shanghai in the summer of 2012, Vukovic searched for the traces of a grown and growing city in China. In doing so, she was able to document urban developments, sometimes in extreme dimensions. Ever larger, more extensive and extremely dense buildings being built without consideration of natural rhythms, whether of the inhabitants or the environment. Nature is displaced by plastic, by artificial things and buildings: an invasion of the plastic, the artificial, the non-natural. But nature also pushes the city back in places: trees, reeds and weeds form green islands in the concreted city.

Vucovic is a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund. Since 2010 she has also worked in the medium of Video.

In her 2010 series "Safe Heaven", Vukovic presents night photographs taken in front of the refugee shelter in Schöppingen. The nameless refugees are depicted like ghosts trying to escape from the artificially lit room. During her artist-in-residence stay in the artists' village of Schöppingen, Vanja Vukovic often talked to the people in the refugee home, learned a lot from them and gained their trust. Her pictures show the sensitivity of the artist and the photographed. Matthias Ulrich, the curator of the Schirn Kunsthalle, commented on the refugees depicted in the photo series: "Whether they will ever reach a secure heaven, however, and whether they will ever be able to write down a continuation of their story in a new home is another story."

She has won several prizes, among others an award at the fifth Aenne-Biermann-Preis and as finalist at the Golden Award of Montreux in 2007.

From 1994 to 2000 she studied communications design at the Fachhochschule Darmstadt, in the Design and Photography department, graduating with a diploma. During her studies at Darmstadt, in 1997-98, she spent a semester abroad at the University of Portsmouth, Great Britain, in the Department of Media Arts, Photography. Later, in a postgraduate course, she studied fine arts with Martha Rosler and Wolfgang Tillmans at the State Academy of Fine Arts, Städelschule Frankfurt.

Vanja Vukovic (born 1971 in Montenegro, grew up in Stuttgart) is a fine-art photographer and photo-designer living in Germany.