Bosnia and Herzegovina

b. 1994

Smirna Kulenović is a transdisciplinary artist, activist and researcher based in Vienna, Austria. Her work primarily focuses on cultural, personal and environmental embodiments of trauma, identity and memory in post-war landscapes. For example, in her performance piece, Our Family Garden: First Women’s Line of Defense 2021, Kulenović starts a social and ecological healing process thirty years after the outbreak of the Bosnian war. Together with 100 women wearing red, they plant 1000 seeds of calendula flowers on the hilltops overlooking Sarajevo in an act of revival and resurrection. Kulenović, who had her master’s degree from the Department of Interface Cultures at the University of Arts and Design Linz, Austria, has performed her work in Bosnia-Herzegovina (2021), the United Kingdom (2019), Germany (2018) and Portugal (2018). Her participatory performance “Our Family Garden” was part of Perform Europe, an EU-funded project on performance arts, in 2022.