About — Gordana Zikic

Short biography and extended biography below — followed by artist statement. Full CV available on the CV page.

Short biography

Gordana Zikic is an interdisciplinary artist, residency director, and community builder based in Barcelona. Over twenty years her practice has moved across painting, installation, performance, photography, and wearable technology — always at the threshold of embodied experience, shamanic research, and contemporary life.

She co-directs Belgrade Artist in Residence (BAIR, est. 2012), which has hosted artists from over thirty countries, and Virtual Studio Groups (VSG, est. 2021), an international peer community of sixty-plus artists that publishes VSG Magazine. She is co-founder of the AIR Exchange Network, a peer structure for residency organizers, and Whatzart Lab — a platform where working artists evaluate each other's work, permanently recorded, training an AI on what artists actually consider significant: not what sells, not what institutions declare important, but a description of contemporary art built entirely from the judgment of the people who make it.

Her current research explores oracle systems, shamanic technology, and the archaeological memory of place. She holds a doctorate in fine arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade.

Extended biography

Gordana Zikic is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice spans painting, installation, performance, photography, and emerging technology. Based in Barcelona, she has sustained an inquiry into threshold, transliminality, and the role of the artist as mediator — grounded in her doctoral research at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade (2018), in which the installation itself constituted the research.

Her ongoing bodies of work include El Mar Hirviendo, a long-term photographic observation of the sea surface from the Barceloneta pier; an archaeological research project on ceramic fragments from the historical Somorrostro neighborhood, supported by the Beca Territoris grant at Centre Cívic Barceloneta; and Oracle Birds, a series of handmade AI-powered sculptures exploring shamanic cosmology through voice-activated image generation and physical interaction. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo presentations in Stockholm, Valencia, and Barcelona, and group exhibitions in New York, Istanbul, Aarhus, and Wroclaw.

She co-directs Belgrade Artist in Residence (BAIR, est. 2012), one of the longest-running independent residency programs in the region, which has hosted artists from over thirty countries with exchange partnerships across Europe. She also co-directs Virtual Studio Groups (VSG, est. 2021), an international community of sixty-plus curated artists that meets weekly and publishes VSG Magazine. She is co-founder of the AIR Exchange Network, a peer structure for residency organizers and artist-run spaces.

Her most recent initiative, Whatzart Lab, is a decentralized art valuation ecosystem — a registry where working artists evaluate each other's work, permanently recorded, training an AI on what artists actually consider significant. It is infrastructure for a future where the art community, not the market alone, determines value.

She is a member of ULUS (Serbia) and La Escocesa (Barcelona).

Artist statement

My practice is an ongoing investigation into transformation — how bodies, materials, spaces, and communities change through creative process.

I work across painting, installation, performance, photography, and ritual objects, following each project wherever it leads rather than staying within a single medium. What connects everything is the territory I keep returning to: threshold states, the body as site of knowledge, the sacred embedded in everyday materials, and the capacity of art to shift perception and contribute to healing.

My doctoral research at the Faculty of Fine Arts Belgrade proposed the contemporary artist as a shaman-like figure — someone who expands consciousness, transgresses the limits of everyday life, and contributes to the wellbeing of community. Both the artist and the shaman share what researchers call transliminality: a heightened sensitivity to psychological material arising from the unconscious or the environment. This framework didn't emerge from theory alone — it grew from my own experience, rooted in a childhood spent with a grandmother who practiced fortune-telling and treated the occult as entirely natural.

Performance entered my practice through the body of work itself. While making masks for my doctoral exhibition, I found I needed to use them — to wear them, to move in them, to let them do what masks have always done: enable transformation by making the inner world visible. From that point, performance became the form I reach for when something in my own life needs to change — a fear to face, a pattern to release, a transition to mark. These are not theatrical performances but personal rituals made public, created from the same impulse that drives shamanic ceremony: the need to cross a threshold and come back changed.

That foundation shapes how I approach materials. Feathers, beeswax, shells, fur, raw canvas, water, charcoal — nothing is merely decorative. Each material carries history, sensation, and symbolic weight. In my large-format paintings, the canvas is sized to match my height and arm span, making the body the primary tool. In installations, found and natural objects are transformed into what I think of as sacred objects — not through mystification, but through sustained attention and intentional placement.

The sea appears repeatedly in my work as a threshold space — neither land nor depth, surface nor stillness. A decade-long practice of returning to the same pier in Barcelona produced paintings, photographs, and sound that approach water not as landscape but as a living presence where restlessness is held, not resolved.

Across all these forms, the goal is the same: to create a space where transformation becomes possible — for the materials, for myself, and for the people who encounter the work.

Projects and initiatives

Est. 2012