Margareta Kern was born in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, then part of socialist Yugoslavia in 1974. Following the outbreak of the Bosnian civil war, she sought asylum in England and obtained British citizenship in 2002, studying variously at Kingsway College, Goldsmiths College and University College London. Her artistic practice engages with the social and political arena through inter-disciplinary projects and her final works often take a multi-layered form that includes film, photography, installation, drawing, performance and text.
Artist Margareta Kern was born in 1974 in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, then part of socialist Yugoslavia. At the outbreak of the Bosnian civil war, Kern sought asylum in England, was granted leave to remain and obtained British citizenship in 2002. She completed a Foundation course in Art and Design at Kingsway College, London (1993–95) before being awarded a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College (1995–98), and an MA in visual anthropology from University College (University of London, 2008–10). Her work responds to new systems of techno-military power, often drawing on her personal history shaped by migration. Her projects, developed over extended periods of time, are the result of an immersion into rigorous research, investigative inquiry and experimentation, often disclosing unexpected connections and hidden narratives. Her artistic practice engages with the social and political arena through inter-disciplinary projects and her final works often take a multi-layered form that includes film, photography, installation, drawing, performance and text. Kern is interested in the relationship of performance, narrative and participation to documentary and experimental image making, as well as in the potential political subjectivities and agencies that are created in that process, including the relationship between art and activism.
Influenced by contemporary ethnography, Kern’s work has investigated intimate spaces and narratives, raising questions about visibility, power and representation. Many of her works are informed by the sense of displacement she experienced as a refugee, as well as by the new political and social status she gained in England. In 2003, she set up a loose collective of professional artists, all of whom had arrived as refugees in the UK, called 'Leave to Remain'. This was a brave and polemical project at a time when the popular press was leading a series of moral panics about the country being flooded by waves of so-called ‘illegal immigrants’. Curating an exhibition of the same name that toured to several London venues in 2003–04, Kern declared that her aim was ‘to show the work of artists who were willing to knowingly frame their work within the bracket of ‘refugee art’ precisely in order to raise […] questions and to challenge that frame’ (Manz 2015, p. 100). The show included one of her own works, Standard Class Opinions, an installation of portrait snapshots taken on random train journeys around England of fellow passengers who were then invited to offer a ‘one-line’ opinion on what they felt about the presence of asylum-seekers in the UK. A passionate Londoner, Kern is aware that her departure from Banja Luka was a traumatic experience, but that at the same time it was a revealing and ‘coming of age’ moment.
Her long term project GUESTures, which included a video under the same title (2011), focused on the overlooked histories of women migrant workers, part of organised mass migration from the socialist Yugoslavia to West Germany in the late 1960s. The work explored the fragmented and incomplete nature of memory and narrative, and revealed the potential of an artwork ‘as an archive and a memorial to the unsaid and the unheard’ (artist’s website). Other projects included Clothes for Living & Dying, a major body of work and an international solo exhibition tour to Croatia, Germany and the UK (2005–08), as well artist-in-residence projects at the University of Bath Institute for Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts (2010) and at the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University (2012), among others. Kern’s residency at Durham was broadly concerned with the historical and political legacy of the 1984 Miners’ strikes, and their relevance to contemporary social movements and anti-austerity protests in the UK and elsewhere. During the residency she explored the issues of memory, archiving and historicising radical politics and their representation and contestation on screen.
Until 2019 Kern was an artist-in-residence at Birkbeck School of Law and currently teaches photography at Falmouth University’s Institute of Photography. She is a founding member of Artists' Union England, and is part of Precarious Workers Brigade, a UK-based collective campaigning against precarisation in culture and education. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Tate, Whitechapel Gallery and INIVA, London, among others. Kern was a recipient of several project grants and awards, including from the National Media Museum, British Film Institute, and the international 54th October Salon Award from the Cultural Centre Belgrade in 2013. Most recently, Kern was awarded an Arts Council England Project Grant for a new body of work, starting with a new work commission for the Whitstable Biennale in June 2018. Her work has also been supported by the British Council. Margareta Kern currently lives and works between London and Cornwall. Her work is not represented in UK public collections.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Margareta Kern]
Publications related to [Margareta Kern] in the Ben Uri Library