Exhibition Text

With Confusion model into a butterfly, the Kunstverein für Mecklenburg und Vorpommern in Schwerin presents the first institutional solo exhibition by artist Adriana Ramić in Germany. Informed by her transcultural biography, Ramić’s multimedia installations – comprising videos, sculptures, and language – reflect questions of hybrid identities, transcultural forms of knowledge, and the limits of anthropocentric thinking. Out of this context, she develops poetic, conceptual works that operate both analytically and speculatively, and make visible references to political realities of the present and past. For her exhibition in Schwerin, Ramić weaves together sculptural and video-based works from recent years of her artistic practice and places them in dialogue with the specific architecture of the exhibition space. At its center is the newly conceived 5-channel video installation Multi-scene inputs (Oursa and Ljudmila), 2025–26, which accompanies two cats, Oursa and Ljudmila, as protagonists in different historical and geographical contexts.

Oursa lives in the former residence of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled the country for more than four decades and arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, and executed political opponents, civilians, and even his own allies. Built in 1973, the villa – also known as Object X – was part of a secluded residential complex in Tirana that only selected representatives of the regime could access. Today, it serves as an artist residency and cultural center – a place where the artist herself was a guest last year. Despite its current repurposing, the villa’s architecture continues to embody a past of repressive exercises of power and contradictory self-staging. While Hoxha rigorously suppressed Western influences in art, music, and architecture, the villa’s furnishings – from the cinema to the private elevator and pool – were demonstratively modeled on Western examples. Once a symbol of power and privilege and now, through its appropriation and accessibility, a testament to resistance against an authoritarian regime, the villa can be read today as an unofficial site of historiography.

Three of the five video channels follow Oursa, now the only long-term resident of the site, through the historic rooms. Born in France, she was taken to Albania at a young age to live in the villa, where – according to the results of an animal psychology consultation – she wanted to stay permanently. Oursa’s wanderings through the estate convey a subtle sense of surveillance and an eerie presence; she seems to perceive things that are beyond the visible. The video sequences follow Oursa as she habitually roams the villa and the adjacent garden, hunting birds, mice, and lizards, bringing her prey into the house, and playing with it until her interest wanes and she leaves the animals behind, dazed. Clearly following her instincts, in the context of the villa’s history, this behavior creates an unsettling resonance with the violent acts that were planned and carried out there.

In addition to that, there is video footage of Ljudmila, who was living near Lake Bileća in southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. The lake was artificially created to generate hydroelectric power, completely flooding several villages in the process – including the remains of a Roman villa. Only in the summer months, when the water level drops, do the ruins reappear, allowing Ljudmila, visitors to the region, and the artist herself to walk through the sunken past. The videos of Ljudmila recorded in 2021 are among Ramić’s earliest video works and were also created during a residency near the lake. They reflect her exploration of part of her family’s country of origin. The camera follows Ljudmila along grassy fields, through ruined landscapes, and across wide shorelines. These scenes are repeatedly interwoven with footage of other historically significant places in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the Smrike necropolis in Novi Travnik, one of many Yugoslav-era memorials to victims of fascism, and a meadow above the Neolithic settlement of Okolište, one of the largest archaeological sites in the region.

Through the sculptural embedding of the five video channels in mirror-walled maquettes, the moving images constantly generate new patterns and are set in relation to their immediate surroundings. The videos are interspersed with short sequences from earlier works that examine the behavior of other animals, including chickens or beetles. In front of the projected images, concave lenses hang at various heights from metal chains fixed in the ceiling. Depending on the viewer’s vantage point, the lenses interfere with the projections, compressing individual image sections and thus shifting the focus of the action. In this way, Ramić subtly expands the narrative structure of the exhibition and intertwines supposedly objective historiography with subjective experience. She not only integrates her personal engagement with her post-migrant biography into the various historical and geographical contexts, but she also makes visible the ongoing process of her artistic reflection and actively engages the environment and perspective of the viewer.

The video work is complemented by the installation Enumerate candidates, 2024–26, which alludes to a common tradition in Eastern European countries and beyond: vegetables are pickled, preserved, and cut into simplified, standardized animal shapes in canning jars. Adjacent to this, the installation Unseen behavior, 2024–26, which runs along the wall’s molding, displays a series of animal stickers arranged like an encyclopedic classification system. These stickers come from a Croatian chocolate brand with collectible images that aim to depict as wide a range of living animal species as possible. Both works reflect on how cultural systems produce anthropocentric patterns of order and representation, while also addressing issues of standardization and cataloging.

With this interweaving of different actors and temporalities, Adriana Ramić opens up varied perspectives on the traces of human and non-human activity that develop through and beyond intention. The works thus refer both to the ideological construction of built and scenic realities and to the cyclically recurring patterns of behavior, power, observation, and perception that seem to unfold not only in these places. This creates layered pictorial spaces that reflect agency, social orders, and the significance of past events and historical continuities, as well as their ongoing presence and relevance here and now.

The exhibition is complemented by a digital extension on the Kunstverein’s website. Part of Ramić’s artistic practice involves the constant incorporation of references and findings from various fields of research. In the context of the exhibition, the digital work Times the flowers in function, 2026, primarily brings together animal psychology and behavioral science studies on social learning, shared attention, and natural interaction rituals. These illustrate that cats are capable of recognizing actions, imitating them, and establishing meaningful connections. The source material also reflects Ramić’s research over recent years in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing, as well as more broadly conceived studies with a historical or literary focus. The logic programmed by Ramić translates these findings into a poetic methodology of content and meaning production.

The exhibition and accompanying catalog are supported by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation as part of its sponsorship award for catalogues by young artists. The catalogue will be compiled and published in the course of this year.

Translation: Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov