hanaselenasokolovic

Hana Selena Sokolović

Hana Selena Sokolović (b. 1999, Vienna) is a visual artist and researcher raised in Belgrade, working between the Balkans and the Netherlands. She explores memory, emotional inheritance, and the ways personal and collective histories shape identity in post-conflict societies, particularly within the post-Yugoslav context. She works with photography, video, text, and archival materials, navigating the space between documentary and fiction. Her work treats storytelling and the archive as active tools to examine vulnerability, and the politics of visibility surrounding histories of conflict and displacement.

Education

2023-2025 MA Photography&Society, Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, NL
2018-2021 BA Photography and New Media, Film and TV Faculty, Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, CZ

SELECTED

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2026 · Draga Orhidejo — Galerija Spot, Zagreb, Croatia
2026 · Draga Orhidejo — SKC Kragujevac, Serbia

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026 · Ono o čemu govorimo / What We Speak Of — KO:KE, Zagreb, Croatia
2026 · Kranj Foto Festival- Kranj, Slovenia
2026 · Breaking Point — Eugster, Belgrade, Serbia
2026 · Rotterdam Photo Festival, Netherlands

FILM SCREENINGS / FESTIVALS
2026 · International Fillm Festival Rotterdam — Dear Orchid, World Premiere
2026 · Sarajevo Film Festival — Dear Orchid, International Premiere
2026 · Tetova International Film Festival — Dear Orchid

AWARDS
2026 · Framing Peace: Women Behind the Lens Award — Sarajevo Photography Festival in collaboration with UN Women Bosnia and Herzegovina

PROGRAMMES / ACADEMIES
2026 · FUTURES Photography Platform
2026 · WHW Akademija, Zagreb

hanaselena22@gmail.com

^{In Tongues (2026)}

In Tongues is a two-channel video installation centred on the absence of four front teeth and the trauma of their loss. The absence permanently changed the structure of the mouth, affecting speech, sound, and the appearance of the face.

In the first channel, the artist looks directly into the camera as breaths, vibrations, movements, and non-verbal sounds emerge from the mouth at the centre of the frame. Without forming words, the voice is reduced to its physical components.

The second channel shows a white, empty baby carriage standing in the middle of a snow-covered field. The landscape is silent and still. The two channels run simultaneously, placing the close-up of the altered mouth alongside the distant, static landscape.

In Tongues approaches voice through its physical conditions: the shape of the mouth, the movement of the tongue, the passage of air, and the production of sound.

^{Dear Orchid (2025)}There are no photographs from the year my sisters, eight and ten at the time, fled Sarajevo at the beginning of the Bosnian War. What remains is a diary, written by my oldest sister. She wrote through displacement, and that writing became the only testimony in our family archive that speaks to a time I did not witness but have come to know through her words and the stories passed down within our family—a time that has deeply impacted the course of our lives and continues to shape my sense of family, identity, and belonging.

The diary covers a period from spring 1992 to winter 1993, during which they moved through several temporary homes across Croatia before eventually settling in Zagreb. In Dear Orchid, I return to these places with my other sister and our father. Using the diary as a guide, we traced a path from Sarajevo to Hvar, Jelsa, and finally Zagreb, revisiting landscapes carrying the memory of their displacement. This journey became the foundation for Dear Orchid, a body of work comprising a 18-minute film, a series of photographs and a publication. This act of return, personal, political, and embodied—asks how the postwar generation might carry its inheritances with care and responsibility.

To engage with the archive is to engage with history not as past, but as structure, active, transmitted, and embedded in the present, carried through generations of sisterhood. The archive, like grief, demands to be held, as something unfinished, unresolved, and still urgently alive.

Exhibition view Dear Orchid
Ured za Fotografiju, Galerija Spot, Zagreb, Croatia
07.04. - 15.04.2026.
photo: Ivan Buvinic

Exhibition view Dear Orchid
Cene Avguštin Gallery, Kranj Foto Fest,
Kranj, Slovenia
26.08. - 27.09.2026.
photo: Katja Pokorn

Exhibition view What we speak of/Ono o cemu govorimo
KO:KE:Creative Farm, Zagreb, Croatia
22.05. - 06.06.2026.
photo: Sanja Mercep

Exhibition view Dear Orchid, SKC Kragujevac, Kragujevac,Serbia
09.06. - 23.06.2026.
photo:Hana Selena Sokolovic

Exhibition view Dear Orchid, SKC Kragujevac, Kragujevac,Serbia 09.06. - 23.06.2026.
photo:Hana Selena Sokolovic

Exhibition view Dear Orchid, SKC Kragujevac, Kragujevac,Serbia
09.06. - 23.06.2026.
photo:SKC Kragujevac

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Memoria: Skopje (2021)

Is a photographic work about the layered urban identity of North Macedonia’s capital, a city continually reshaped by natural disaster, political shifts, and changing ideological agendas. In 1963, an earthquake devastated much of the city’s center, triggering an international reconstruction effort led by the United Nations and architects from across the world. Skopje was reimagined as a model of socialist modernization, where modernist and Brutalist structures rose beside surviving socialist era buildings, marking a period of ambitious architectural transformation. Over subsequent decades, evolving governmental priorities, new interventions, neglect, and the controversial Skopje 2014 project further altered the city’s appearance.

Today, Skopje stands as an urban palimpsest in which conflicting histories and aesthetics coexist in visible tension. I photographed some of the key structures suchas the Central Post Office, Goce Delčev Dormitory, Universal Hall, City Trade Center, Macedonian National Opera and Ballet, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, and the Academy of Sciences and Arts, observing their relationship to contemporary urban life. Working both inside and outside these buildings, the project approaches them not only as architectural artifacts but as active carriers of memory.

As someone born after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, I inevitably encounter “Yugonostalgia” as a complex and shifting form of inherited memory. The city’s architecture becomes a vessel through which these memories are negotiated. Physical locations, symbols,and structures anchor collective and personal histories, yet they are alsounstable and subject to erasure. This project documents Skopje asit exists now, caught between past and present, and asks what happens to memory when the places that hold it begin to disappear.

Senkine Senke (2019)

In 2004, my parents and I moved from Vienna to Belgrade, while my sister remained in Vienna. Since then, our encounters had become infrequent and fragmented, shaped by distance and time. In 2019, I began a personal project in search of a clearer understanding of our relationship, childhood memories, and the layered meanings of sisterhood. The work took shape through several journeys back to Vienna, where I visited her and revisited spaces that held emotional significance. The project combines photography, collected materials, written reflections, and collage, allowing for a fragmented yet intimate reconstruction of shared and separate pasts. Using photography as a therapeutic tool, the project became a means of processing emotional distance and reconnecting through creative exchange. It is both a personal archive and an emotional map, using visual language to navigate attachment, loss, and the quiet evolutions of familial connection.