Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1952 Novi Sad, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now Serbia)

Died: 2012 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1991

Biography

Film and video artist Breda Beban was born in Novi Sad, former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now Serbia) on 24 December 1952. Brought up in Macedonia and Croatia, she trained at the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb, before studying in Berlin. As a child Beban survived the Skopje earthquake, which left nearly a quarter of a million people homeless. She later recalled, 'I clearly remember that as a 10-year-old I should, for some reason either make bargains with fate or the 'world' full of devastated adults. I decided quickly that in each case some kind of freedom would be compromised and opted against both' (The Guardian 2010).

Beban fled her war-torn homeland in 1991 with her partner and collaborator Hrvoje Horvatic, travelling through Italy to finally find refuge in the UK. Settling in London, Beban's artwork focussed on expressing the depths of her innermost experiences – pain, longing, and, most radically, joy and love. The traumatic exile from the former Yugoslavia motivated Beban's exploration of themes of belonging, loss and transcendence in the films, video, installation and photography the couple worked on together between 1986 and 1994, exhibiting jointly at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1994. Their nomadic life was documented in Beban’s photographic series I Lay on the Bed Waiting for his Heart to Stop Beating (2000) which showed the beds they slept in as well as the views from the windows of their temporary accommodation. The final photo featured two single beds, side by side in Homerton hospital, east London, where Horvatic died suddenly in 1997, Beban by his side. Horvatic’s death deprived her of the solace her lover provided in lieu of a homeland. Beban’s work subsequently shifted from an art-house inspired aesthetic to the seriality of video, such as Little Films To Cry To (1997– 2003) which depicted people and places Beban wanted to save. Using popular songs to structure super 8 home movies, the films, while featuring various times, people and places, were part of Beban's mourning process for Horvatic. Beban used her work to interrogate the nature of her own vulnerability, not least in the ongoing tension between her ‘Balkan’ and ‘British’ identities. Inspired by her own experiences as a refugee, she drew on the emotional intersection between the intimate and political; the people in her films and photographs are caught up in human dramas, played out in the shadow of history's grand narratives.

One of Beban's best known works, Walk of the Three Chairs (Arts Council Collection), shown at British Art Show 6, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2005) featured the artist performing a folkdance in a boat, while drifting down the River Danube against the backdrop of the setting sun, a gypsy band providing musical accompaniment. At a certain point, one of the band members started to sing and she gradually joined in. While she was doing so, she walked along three chairs, manoeuvred for her by members of the band. Positioned at a point in the river that was traditionally thought to be the edge of Europe and the start of the Balkans, one bank revealed Belgrade's industrial landscape while trees and wooden dachas populated the other. The film took its title from a traditional Balkan pagan ritual, one that the artist recalled her grandfather performed after winning at cards. As exemplified by this work, despite the tragic departure from her homeland, Beban ‘evoked the tenderness at the edge of things that binds past and present, history and reality, loss and memory, in a transforming, visually poetic form’ (Arts Council Collection).

In recognition of her work in the UK, in 2001 Beban received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for visual artists. Alongside her work as an artist, Beban was also a curator, organising Imaginary Balkans, a group exhibition at Site Gallery, Sheffield which subsequently featured in Themes in Contemporary Art edited by Gill Perry and Paul Wood (Yale University Press, 2005). She was also the curator/creative producer of imagine art after, a multi-stage project whose first stage, an online dialogue, was hosted by the Guardian Unlimited (November-December 2005) and which aimed to connect London-based migrant artists with those who remained in their home countries. An exhibition was hosted by Tate in 2007, the year in which Beban's two-screen video installation, The Most Beautiful Woman in Gucha was presented at the Venice Biennale (it subsequently toured the UK) and was later acquired for the Speed Art Museum permanent collection in Kentucky, USA. In 2010, her project the Endless School was presented at the Tatton Park Biennial in Cheshire. Beban also taught at Sheffield Hallam University, where she was Professor of Visual Arts and Reader in Media. Breda Beban died in London, England in 2012 after a long illness. Her work is represented UK public collections including the Arts Council Collection and Tate Collection.

Related books

‘The ‘Irriducible Singularity’ of Breda Beban’s Walk of the Three Chairs, 2003’, in Stefan Manz, Refugees and Cultural Transfer to Britain (London: Routledge, 2015)
Maria Walsh, 'Obituaries: Breda Beban', Art Monthly, June 2012, p. 19
D. Briers, ‘Breda Beban’, Art Monthly, July 2000, pp. 35-36
‘Everything is Connected’, Sight and Sound, 1 February 1995, p. 28
Catherine Elwes, Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic, Art Monthly, September 1994, pp. 32-34

Public collections

Related organisations

imagine art after (founder and curator)
Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Arts (recipient)
Sheffield Hallam University (Professor of Visual Arts and a Reader in Media)

Selected exhibitions

My Funeral Song, Camden Arts Centre (2010)
Tatton Park Biennial (2010)
The Most Beautiful Woman in Gucha - Part One, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010)
The Most Beautiful Woman in Gucha - Part One, Lightbox, Tate Britain (2008)
Zoo Art Fair, Royal Academy of Art (2007)
British Art Show 6, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Hayward Gallery touring exhibition) (2005)
Strangers to Ourselves, 201 St John Street, London (2004)
A Century of Artists' Film in Britain, Tate Britain (2003)
I Can’t Make You Love Me, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and touring to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton; Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn (2003)
Touchdown, Peer at St. Augustine’s Tower, London (2003)
For One Night Only, 38 Langham St. Gallery, London (2003)
Imaginary Balkans, Site Gallery, Sheffield (2002)
Breda Beban, Site Gallery, Sheffield (2000)
Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1994)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Breda Beban]