Sofia Hallström explores the reality of war in Ivana Bašić’s ‘Temptation of Being’ at Albion Jeune, London.
“I have been faced directly with brutality, violence, and the tangible limits of physical existence. This created an impulse in me to find a way out, to transcend or transform these limitations into some kind of potential,” says New York-based artist Ivana Bašić’s (b. 1986, Belgrade), speaking over Zoom from Taipei, as she prepares ahead of this year’s Taipei Biennial opening in November 2025. We are discussing her exhibition, Temptation of Being, at Albion Jeune in London, where dim lighting casts a spotlight over sculptures composed of wax, bronze, glass, copper, and razor-sharp steel. The sculptures are fractured, displaced, and forcibly altered entities that suspend somewhere between flesh and machine, past and present, destruction and rebirth, borne from Bašić’s lived experience of war.
Bašić was a child during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. “My mother’s family was exiled from Dalmatia during the civil war in 1992. My grandmother fled as a refugee, losing everything. Then, in 1999, during the NATO bombings, we spent days in shelters,” she recalls. “We lived next to a military airport, so the war was viscerally present. The collapse of Yugoslavia felt like it was inching closer and closer, and during the bombings, it reached the very borders of my own skin. That kind of existential terror left a deep imprint, and my work became a way to expel it, to process and transform it. I never set out to be an artist and I wasn’t trained as one, but it became something I had to do to keep from suffocating on these experiences.” The Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) shattered the illusion of unity in a country once held together by Tito’s rule, leaving behind a brutal legacy of ethnic conflict, displacement, and destruction. As the federation unraveled, war consumed Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, with sieges, mass killings, and NATO bombings, marking the region’s violent fracture.
The existential terror of war and its ability to reduce both bodies and cities to dust became the foundation of Bašić’s work. But to Bašić, dust is not just a remnant of destruction, but a substance of rebirth as she engages with the philosophy of Reza Negarestani, who writes that “dust is irreducible… the elemental object of creation.” Transformation and the idea of metamorphosis through containment is a crucial idea for Bašić in Temptation of Being: “Over time, my perspective shifted: what once felt like terror and dissolution became something more hopeful and transformative,” she says. The wall-mounted pieces in the exhibition resemble insect chrysalises or organic rock formations, encased in bronze armour, caught in the act of breaking free. The surrounding steel beams are usually for grounding electrical currents into the earth, yet here they suggest both protection and entrapment. “My recent works reflect that change,” Bašić explains. “They now inhabit a more open-ended, optimistic space compared to my earlier focus on the body’s suffering and trauma. The juxtaposition mirrors the war experience. When escape is impossible, transformation becomes the only means of survival.”
Bašić’s material choices reflect war’s physical and psychological scars. Wax alludes to flesh, fragility, and decay. Blown glass, created through heat and breath, embodies preservation of life. Stainless steel represents the forces of control and violence.
Hypostasis is a floor-based sculpture of translucent glass ovals lled with dust and the artist’s breath. “Breath has always obsessed me,” Bašić says. “It contains a polarity as it sustains life, but also brings us closer to death. That contradiction is at the heart of my work.” These delicate, sealed forms evoke preservation and suffocation. In Breath seeps through her tightly closed mouth | Position II: Swelling #2, Bašić expands on this idea with a suspended blown-glass form, encased in a steel frame. The steel acts as both a support and a constraint, reinforcing the tension between containment and release. Here, breath is no longer free, rather it is captured and conned, mirroring the suffocating experience of war. The glass forms in Temptation of Being function as reliquaries, preserving what is most fleeting: breath, dust, remnants of presence, and in doing so, Bašić confronts the viewer with a fundamental question: What does it mean to endure? Is survival simply the act of continuing, or is it about transformation and becoming something altered, yet still existing?
Ungrounding, a series of watercolor drawings on paper, are presented on the exhibition walls and serve as precursors for her sculptural work. The earthy pigments wash and dissolve into the paper in rounded, organic forms. Temptation of Being is not just an exploration of metamorphosis but a reckoning with war’s imprint on the body, the psyche, and the landscape. How does war shape what is left behind? What traces linger in flesh, memory, and matter? “I work hard to erase my own hand in the making of these pieces,” Bašić explains. “I want them [the sculptures] to feel uncreated, as if they simply exist.” This deliberate absence of an identifiable creator gives her work an unsettling timelessness. Her sculptures refuse to be tethered to any single moment, instead existing in a state of perpetual becoming, much like the bodies and cities shaped by war that are never fully restored, never entirely gone. “Initially, my instinct was to escape the body altogether,” Bašić explains. “But over time, I started to see transformation not as a loss, but as a kind of liberation.”
The title Temptation of Being speaks to Bašić’s ongoing negotiation with embodiment. “The pieces exist in a state of taking form, or conversely, of abandoning form,” she says. “They are always on the threshold of existence.” In a world still marked by displacement and conflict, Temptation of Being is both an elegy and a warning. Survival is not just endurance, it is also transformation, a theme central to Bašić’s work. Her sculptures embody the lasting imprint of war, where bodies, memories, and landscapes are forever reshaped by violence. Yet history repeats itself. Despite the wreckage left behind, war resurfaces, driven by those who never suffer its consequences. Bašić’s work asks: what remains after destruction, and why do we continue to let it happen?
Written by Sofia Hallström
