Ivana Ranisavljević is a performance artist whose work explores the transgressive spaces of femininity — liminal states between identity, social roles, and the norms that patriarchal structures impose on the female body and experience. Her practice is characterized by intense bodily engagement, endurance, and direct confrontations with power structures, gender roles, and the limitations imposed on the self.

Her performances evoke strong emotional reactions, often unsettling yet deeply cathartic for both the artist and the audience. The body, as a site of resistance, becomes a medium through which personal and collective narratives are rewritten — not through illustration, but through lived experience.

A significant aspect of her work is the inclusion of family members as participants or silent witnesses, emphasizing how societal constructs infiltrate the most intimate spaces and how personal rebellion can ripple into broader change.

In a time of increasing alienation and commodification of art, her work insists on presence, vulnerability, and raw human connection. Her performances do not offer passive consumption — they demand engagement, unsettling yet awakening something primal and urgent within the viewer.

Alongside performance, Ranisavljević is developing a new cycle of textile installations in which embroidery becomes a political and performative act — a slow, repetitive gesture that materialises language and inscribes it into space.

Her practice is not just artistic expression but a method of resistance — a reclaiming of agency in an era that constantly seeks to define and confine.

Biografphy

Ivana Ranisavljević (b. 1983, Belgrade) began as a painter. Her early work was devoted to Jungian psychoanalytic theory — archetypes, ritual systems, and the visual language of the unconscious — explored through painting and installation. The turning point came around 2012, when she entered the field of physical theatre and dance performance through a collaboration with director Uroš Jovanović. What followed was, in her own words, an existential shift — from image to body as primary medium.

Since then, her practice has developed as a consistent and courageous investigation into the relationship between the female body, patriarchal structures, and social norms. Through endurance performances, bodily interventions, and durational practices, she poses questions that Serbian institutional culture often avoids: who has the right to space, voice, and visibility? What does the female body carry, remember, and refuse to forget?

Her work has received international recognition — acquired by the Wiener Art Collection, a collection of contemporary Serbian art by Wiener Städtische, and presented at the Venice International Performance Art Week (2016, 2017), in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Poland and Estonia. She was shortlisted for the Serbian pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024. During a formative period, she trained and collaborated with the most significant figures of international body art — Marina Abramović, Franko B, VestAndPage, and Andrigo&Aliprandi.

Today, alongside developing a new cycle of works at the intersection of performance and textile installation, she is founding Kožuar Art Lab — a rural arts centre and residency programme in western Serbia, built on the same principles that drive her artistic practice: presence, resistance, and belief in the transformative power of art.