My Funeral Song © Breda Beban, courtesy of the artist and Camden Arts Centre

First of all, I just wanted to ask you how you became an artist? It’s an easy question to ask…

It’s a very complicated answer! Because in my life, I’ve tried everything not to be an artist. I always wanted to be something else. I wanted to study physics. I wanted to study mathematics. I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be a designer. I wanted to be a film director. And all my attempts were always very unsuccessful!

Did you just not have the brain? I mean the right kind of brain..!

I don’t – maybe I don’t. Or maybe it is that I am much more persistent when it comes to art. I don’t give up.

I’m not sure why this is. But whenever it comes to art, I can be very stubborn. And I will pursue projects and I will fight for them and, even if they are completely falling apart, in terms of funding or in terms of working with collaborators, and cast and crew, or whatever I do, I tend to be very stubborn and persistent. And I tend to carry them through.

Did you study art?

Yes I did, but again, by accident. I wanted to study design. And this was in the early 70s, in Yugoslavia, and it wasn’t possible to study design. At the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb, they had a subject called ‘design’. So that’s why I enrolled to the Academy of Fine Art. But it was just like drawing crazy lines. It had nothing to do with design. It was some form of exercise in free-line drawing or controlling the line – I never got what it was about. But I kind of carried on. And that’s how I was trained as an artist.

And what about the moving image?

Again, an accident. I was doing a performance in my apartment in Zagreb. And I moved out my family and the furniture and everybody and the performance was to be for only 30 invited people. And then a young director rang and said that he would like to make like a short, brief documentary for television about it. And I said, “Yes.” And they came along as I was doing rehearsals, to do the camera set up and all that. And they had a monitor and I was looking at that, while doing my own things, and realised that my performance would have been much better if I could have used moving image. Because certain problems I had with the performance would just not be there. Through the means of editing and the means of controlling time and all that.

And that young director was Hrvoje Horvatic. I was very open about the fact that…why am I doing a performance…this would be much better if it were filmed. And next day he gave me a call and he said, “So would you like to make film?” And I said, “Yes, but I don’t know how to.” And he said, “Maybe I can help.”

And that’s how I started working with Hrvoje.

You collaborated with Hrvoje over many years. And he hadn’t been an artist before?

No, he was trained very much in the East European sort of Film Academy, where he had to know everything about cameras and everything – the detail about film making. I came from the art world into filmmaking – so we kind of swapped.

You mentioned Yugoslavia. You were born in Serbia, raised in Macedonia and Croatia. But they weren’t known as those countries then; they weren’t those nation states then. And you leave with Hrvoje, who’s by now your partner, and you move to London. In David Curtis’ book,  he says how the works you made “marked the progress from being internal exiles to statelessness to being an exile in London”. Leaving home, and being in exile, how do you make art and films in those changing circumstances?

The work Hrvoje and I did in former Yugoslavia existed in a sort of self-chosen world. And we were not thinking much about it. We just did what we felt we had to do. When exile came it became suddenly, strangely, impossible to do work like that. And [we were] faced with a lot of impossibilities, even faced with depression, faced with a lot of pain and a lot of anger, for a long time, it was almost impossible to articulate any ideas.

But I think what also contributed to it is that, although our work until then existed in this self-chosen world, we were still relating to the geography. To the shape of the geography where we came from.

When we moved to Britain, although it’s not a culture which is dramatically different, silence kind of fell upon us. Because Britain is coded – or at least England or London – they were coded with completely different, silent codes, which we couldn’t understand, as much as we wanted to, even though we spoke a bit of English. We couldn’t understand.

And then the problems started because there was no way of having a self-chosen world for us. And our effort became about understanding where we were. So the work made at that stage, at that time, became much more direct and through a sort of strange desire to relate to the world around us.

To the new world?

To the new world. But with every attempt, we were crashing against a certain form of misunderstanding or distance or alienation.

But at the same time, they are works about loss and pain and displacement, aren’t they? And they refer to where you’re from.

Yes they are, but more than that. I don’t look at them, but I have seen some of them recently. They are sort of desperate attempts at communication… falling down, the most ultimate desperate attempt at communicating – all the things that I kind of carried on doing.

Yes, you’ve fallen down again more recently.

Yes, I kind of tend to do that.

But in quite a different way.

Even something like your one-minute film, The Lifeline Letter, where a letter floats in water and burns. There’s a lot in those works, I think, about what cannot be, about loss, and being unable to touch and grasp things.

So are you saying that that’s both about being an exile but also being in a new context? Or without context?

I think, that, for example, The Lifeline Letter was made more for our new friends and our potential new viewers than for anybody back there where we came from.

We were faced with the complexity of the situation – of where we came from –  which was a tragedy. Our country separated and destroyed by war. And at the same time, being in Britain, where the media coverage of what was happening there was in complete contradiction to what we had experienced.

And whenever people would ask, “What’s really happening to your country?” we just felt, “Well, do you have three years, three days, or how many hours do you have?”

I can see it now. At the time, I couldn’t see it. We just did the best we could. But the films were these cryptic, slightly hermetic attempts at ‘saying’. We sort of leaped towards poetry. We wanted to be very precise linguistically, formally, about all these ambiguities, with regard to these huge questions that we didn’t know answers to.

I was going to ask you whether they were poems or essays. I saw Geography at Riverside Studios in the late 80s, I think. That was before you came here.

Geography was made just as we knew that the country was going to fall apart.

And I remember thinking that there were a lot of very specific references there that I didn’t understand then. That I might understand better now. But then your work, when you come here, seems to lose that essay quality and becomes more poetic and universal.

I think, yes. I don’t want this to sound too complicated and it’s impossible to speak simply about all these grand sorts of things that are always actually looming in the background of everything I do or that Hrvoje and I did together.

Without going into exile, or without the experience of exile, certain aspects of my character would have remained dormant forever. Because I would have kept on developing within a particular type of culture. Because, you know, when we are born, I think we are genetically coded, but then we become a work in progress.

And I think that kind of work-in-progress aspect has contributed to me becoming a much more complex character. And certain aspects of my character were suddenly illuminated. And I am convinced they would have remained dormant without me moving to Britain, where I had to renegotiate who I am and what it means to be – this notion of the horrible word: identity. What does it mean when confronted with another culture, within or against the backdrop of another culture?

And though you feel like there is a lot of aggression in that process, actually, when you really accept that, then there is this kind of beauty of understanding that who you are is not a fixed thing. It’s something that is not only changing but is unstable. Forever and ever. And wherever you are.

But I don’t think that I would have understood that if I would have stayed where I was, or tried to remain where I kind of came from. However complex that territory is in terms of these kind of cultural references ­– and I think a similar thing was happening with the work as well. It kind of started opening up to themes and formal approaches that were, for us, impossible before then.

And while that’s happening and you’re establishing a new life, you’re achieving success as artists and then, shockingly and suddenly, Hrvoje dies. And as losing a partner, you are losing the person that you’ve collaborated with for a decade. So there’s the personal pain, but what impact does that have on your approach to art?

Well, as we are talking, something crossed my mind. I am someone who has one life and three CVs! I have the CV as an artist in Yugoslavia, which fell apart completely, and a lot of things I did have became completely irrelevant.

Then I have a CV working with Hrvoje Horvatic. Then he’s gone.

And now, I have a CV of working on my own. So there is something absurd there because every time I have to kind of reinvent something.

But it is true that, you know, apart from losing Hrvoje, which was a tremendous personal loss and pain, on the professional level, artistic level, I again lost. I didn’t know who I was anymore. So that, I had to find out.

So how did you find out? What did you find?

The most surprising thing I realised is that throughout all the time I worked with Hrvoje, I was actually making work that I wasn’t showing. Or was never thinking that it was going to be shown. It was like my survival strategy, but used as a purely physical kind of survival strategy on day-to-day basis, which comprised predominantly of taking photographs all the time and writing bits and pieces of text related to them. But almost as if I had amnesia; I wasn’t really aware that I was doing that. So, with the loss of Hrvoje, I never went through old photographs of the two of us or the life lost in that way. What suddenly emerged were all these boxes and boxes of photographs I did which were all about his absence. Because I always did them when he wasn’t around. Almost secretly. Though I didn’t feel like I had to do it like that.

And out of that material, my first solo show in Britain happened, which was called Still at the Site Gallery in Sheffield.

So suddenly, there was all this work that I was making that I wasn’t even really aware of. It’s like I was in living in some form of amnesia.

And it included the video work, Never Only One Time Three, which relates to death.

That particular piece is about offering myself as a material to psychic readers. They had 15 minutes to guess my past, my character, and my future. And they were just edited back-to-back. And it was amazing how accurate some of them were. That kind of shocked me. Because I’ve never had that experience before. They are like machines for telling stories.

But however accurate they were, you’re presenting this as art. So inherent in that there’s a wry humour, and maybe an irony that I think wasn’t in the work before.

Well, that’s true. The last piece we did together is Jason’s Dream. Which is a musical! An experimental musical. And I did it in spite of Hrvoje!

I wrote the script very quickly, and he refused to do it. He chucked it. And he refused to do it because he thought that it was for imbeciles! Quote! And he did everything in his power to sabotage it. And that is a piece which, finally, for me, was about humour and it was about embracing life and it was about certain forms of pleasure. And it was about Britain, post-colonial, post-feminist Britain. And it was about the life I was having in London, so it was something I wanted to really connect to. And that was a way for me to do that. Because sometimes, I use art to connect to life.

And I think your work has continued in that vein. It doesn’t need the same decoding. There’s an immediacy. There’s a humour. There’s an openness.

I’d like to think that. This is the ‘irony’ which I learned in Britain. And I’m so thankful for this. Irony being the sum of all gains and losses. And I’m so grateful for that.

In Let’s Call It Love, there’s an explicit game isn’t there. There’s war on the one side, you know, in battle with love.

With intimacy and love and longing.

Well… intimacy, love and longing have pervaded your work since then.

I would like to think. I constantly try to avoid contradictions but what I do with my work, it just does happens, and now I want them.

We can laugh and cry at the same time..

Exactly, exactly. Which is what the funeral song, My Funeral Song is about, isn’t it?

My Funeral Song © Breda Beban, courtesy of the artist and Camden Arts Centre

Well, what is it about?

It kind of was triggered by shared moments of happiness with friends, where there’s a lot of dancing, drinking and having lots of fun.

Well, that’s not very British!

You’d be surprised!

But there often comes a moment, which is late at night or early in the morning, when someone completely takes over the music. And, you know, you have to kind of hear all the lyrics of their favourite songs.

And they torture you, basically, but you are happily tortured. And then there comes a moment when someone says, “If I drop dead tomorrow, this is the song I want played at my funeral.” That’s what triggered the piece.

So I filmed a number of my friends as they listened to their funeral song. And finally made a selection of five portraits, so to speak, which are part of the exhibition at Camden Arts Centre. And they are all different.

There’s one where someone falls apart. It’s very romantic and sentimental. There’s one where there’s a storm raging in the background. There’s one which is very irritating. And I think my friends’ characters come pretty much across. It’s five portraits because I think five is the first large number – and so the viewer can still remember and relate to each individual. I think when you go over five, you start using people. You start creating wallpapers.

So it was a big excuse for me, this piece, after being incredibly busy for a number of years, where I felt that I had no life anymore, to reconnect with my life and my friends. And see what actually I am all about, in a way.

But there is also this kind of sense, something looming in the background of My Funeral Song, that the party has moved on. It’s not in London anymore. The big party has moved. It’s in Beirut now. It’s in Buenos Aries.

Countries that are not having the financial crisis that we are going through at the moment – that are experiencing different things.

You work as a curator as well. There’s your Imagine Art After project, which is about just that – artists making art in places where they are not from.

Yes, but they are coupled with artists who decided to remain in their country of origin.

And I wanted to look into that. It’s taken place over five years, and now it’s a second edition. So there’s a huge difference between the first and the second edition.

With the first edition, it emerged that the artists working Britain were more confident and had more possibilities to make their work. But now, it looks like that the ones who are, who remained in the country of origin, are actually more confident. And this just happened within a space of six years.

So it’s not like imposing. We don’t know. This is a project which says, “We don’t know.” Let’s allow for this process to kind of happen over a period of time and let’s find out what is really going on. Not only with migrant art but also migration and the geopolitical notion of the local. And what does it mean to migrant artist? What does it mean to be the ones who stayed?  I think it’s a very simple, pure structure that allows for a phenomenal kind of a number of outcomes.

My ambition is big but it’s is a very small team, working and facilitating 24 artists from different countries around the world.

Beautiful Exile, Breda Beban

Now. I didn’t have the courage to ask about this earlier but, back to intimacy. It doesn’t get more intimate than Beautiful Exile, does it… it’s portraits of women… well… you tell me…

Portraits of women before, during and after orgasm all in one shot! Filmed by Robby Müller.

And how did you get them to do that!?

It’s portraits of five women, four close friends and myself. I really felt I didn’t need to be part of it, but it was a condition – two of the women that I really wanted to be part of it said that they will only do it if I will do it. Which I thought it was fair enough.

So, like with My Funeral Song, there is a very old story that is behind all this.

When I was growing up as an artist in Yugoslavia, together with all the younger artists who were part of the art scene, we were very lucky – exposed to films from Russia, European films, American films, the Hollywood films. But to experimental films and underground films coming from America and Europe as well.

And I remember, I always had huge arguments. I couldn’t stand Andy Warhol. I just couldn’t understand what on earth his work was about. People would try to explain to me what this was about and I would go, “I don’t understand it. I grew up in communism. I’ve seen one advert in my life, basically, on the main square.” It was for toothpaste. But we had only one brand of a toothpaste, so it wasn’t about selling. It was reminding people to brush their teeth.

And I remember, we saw Thirteen Most Beautiful Women in a multimedia centre in Zagreb and again, a lot of drinking, a lot of arguments. And I said, “I swear I will inject these images with emotions.” And I forgot about it.

And, actually after I did Beautiful Exile, I was suddenly reminded of that.

But also there’s a lot of sex in those avant garde films and in Yugoslavian underground films.

Yes there was, sex was never a problem. Or any type of censorship, either in Yugoslavia or in our work in general.

But Beautiful Exile is a film about sex which isn’t pornographic.

I focused on faces, because I’m interested in these moments that are sort of the natural elegance of a face, when it’s right here and somewhere else at the same time. When these departures happen.

The other works I was going to ask you about is Walk of Three Chairs and May ’98. So May ’98 is a film about London, Britain, and Walk of Three Chairs you made in Belgrade, and I was thinking how in the work that you made in Yugoslavia, you’re performing in the work, but they’re not portraits.

It’s like, you know, my presence is an ideal

But May ’98 and Walk of Three Chairs – in one you’re falling down, which is slapstick really. And Walk of Three Chairs isn’t quite slapstick.

It is! I hope it is still funny.

There’s a lightness about it. An absurdity about the action.

Well, I’m certainly making a fool over myself.

I cannot sing. And I am making all these attempts at singing. And I want to walk with high heals across these chairs. Floating down a river. On a raft.

Still from My Funeral Song, 2010, Breda Beban

Dates: 11 June – 5 September | Location: Camden Arts Centre, London

My Funeral Song is Breda Beban’s most recent work – a five-screen video installation, presented alongside an earlier series of films, Little Songs To Cry To (2003). Each screen in My Funeral Song focuses on one of Beban’s close friends as they listen to the song they would like to have played at their funeral. The simplicity of each portrait heightens attention to subtle gestures and shifts in expression that chart an inner journey, through psychological states of remembering the past and envisioning a future in their absence.
Continuing her interest in use of sound as a narrative device, the project centres on the power of a well-loved song to compress an outlook on life into a telling moment that is at once melancholic and full of joy. Little Songs To Cry To were filmed spontaneously as ‘home-movies’. These devoted observations of the people closest to Beban are tributes set against the backdrop of a specific soundtrack.

Breda Beban was born in Serbia, raised in Macedonia and Croatia, and is now based in London. Her work often invokes human experiences of relationships, observing how these are played out in the performance of life.

Visit Camden Arts Centre for more information.