Milica Tomić
13th Berlin Biennale, Germany
14 June – 14 September 2025
The 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art is an international exhibition of more than 60 artistic positions and more than 170 works across four venues. The encounter with foxes within the inner city of Berlin is a starting point for the exhibition as an investigation of fugitivity. It examines the ability of works of art to set their own laws in the face of lawful violence in unjust systems, and to allow thinking to enfold even under conditions of persecution, militarization, and ecocide. The title, passing the fugitive on, may be read as a missive or instruction piece to the received. Some fugitive content is passed, and the audience is the receiver of cultural evidence. Now they must themselves turn fugitive, run with it, pass it on, or keep it in hiding until it is transmissible, sayable.
Milica Tomić (born 1960) is a professor and head of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Technical University in Graz and was a professor at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art from 2014 to 2015. She studied painting at the University of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where she graduated with a Master’s degree. In 2003 she presented Serbia / Montenegro at the 50th Venice Biennale. Her work poses questions about political, economic and structural violence as well as social amnesia. She attempts to understand and reveal the inseparable connection between intimacy and politics. In doing so, she uses various areas and methods of contemporary practice in an interdisciplinary way. Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthaus Graz; Kasino, Burgtheater, Vienna; Charim Gallery, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art CINEMA, Belgrade; Steirischer Herbst; Pogon Judinstvo, Zagreb; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Turku Art Museum, Turku; Museum of Contemporary Art CINEMA, Belgrade; Stacion — Center for Contemporary Art, Pristina; Artspace Sydney; Experimental Art Foundation Gallery, Adelaide; ArtPace, San Antonio (2004) and 50. Venice Biennale.
Milica Tomić’s work at Berlin Biennale questions how one can hold the memory of massacres without perpetuating violence. Tomić responds to the form of the knot, going back tot he knotting technique of macramé, as it appears within both her mother’s practice and in Lacanian theory, as a vehicle for subjectivities that can slip from the scripts of national trauma. Her installation isn't about restoration or repair – it's a confrontation with destruction, disappearance, and the irreversible. It demands a different way of looking back, asking what remains when the material of life has been erased.
This is the artist's first collaboration with Phileas.
