Milijana Babić
Tražim posao (Looking for Work)
Milijana Babić is a multimedia visual artist based in Rijeka, Croatia. She studied art at the Durban Institute of Technology in Durban, South Africa (BFA, 2001), and at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia (MFA, 2007). Her artistic practice has a performative basis and explores her own position as a woman and an artist within her immediate living environment. Her work often takes the form of contextually specific, long-term actions in public or semi-public spaces, which may be participatory, or performative interpretations of material gathered through research and performed for the camera. Since the early 2000s, she has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the region and internationally.
Provoked by the ongoing precarious conditions of artistic work, the one-and-a-half-year-long action Tražim posao (Looking for Work) developed as an exploration of the labour market during a period of rising unemployment and growing economic crises in Croatia. It began with the ad “Visual artist urgently looking for work” – in Croatian, referring specifically to a female person – which was continuously published in the local classified ads Burza and Butiga. The ad was predominantly responded to by men, who offered sexually exploitative jobs, such as massage, nude modeling, performances at nightclubs, or weekend companionship. The artist continued the search through job listings, taking on typical temporary positions mostly performed by women, including waitressing in a local bar, cleaning residential and office buildings, promoting high-end products in a shopping mall, distributing advertising material to mailboxes, selling roses in nightclubs, and invigilating exhibitions. She left each position shortly after starting due to exhaustion and poor treatment as a female worker, or sometimes even earlier because of specific incidents, such as a verbal attack by a drunk man while waitressing, or a physical assault by a tenant of an apartment building who was angered by the ignored “No promotional material” sign in the entrance hall.
courtesy Milijana Babić
Document media
Photographs
Issue date
2011 - 2012
To be seen in
re.act.feminism #4 - Archival Chain Reactions, MSUM, Ljubljana, 2026