Margareta Kern’s artistic practice engages with the social and political sphere through multi-layered and inter-disciplinary projects. Kern is interested in the relationship of performance, narrative and participation to documentary and experimental image making, as well as in the relationship of art and activism.
Informed by contemporary ethnography, Kern’s work to date has engaged with intimate spaces and narratives, and with questions around visibility, power and representation.
Kern was born in the socialist Yugoslavia, and migrated to London at the beginning of civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, and Visual and Material Culture at UCL, London. Recent projects include GUESTS, a series of works in response to research and interviews with migrant labourers in Berlin (shown at: Where Everything is Yet To Happen, ex-factory in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Over the Counter: the Phenomenon of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest Journeys With No Return at Kurt-Kurt Gallery Berlin, all 2010); Clothes for Living & Dying, a major body of work and an international solo exhibition tour to Croatia, Germany and the UK (2005 – 2008); and Artist-in-Residence project at the University of Bath Social & Policy Sciences department, and the Institute for Contemporary Interdisciplinary Art (2010).
Kern’s work has been supported by grants and awards from the Arts Council England, the British Film Institute, National Media Museum in Bradford, the British Council and the Croatian Ministry for Culture.