BRANKICA ŽILOVIC Serbian, french, b. 1974

Brankica Žilović is a Franco-Serbian artist born in 1974 in Serbia. She studied at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts and later at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she was taught by Vladimir Veličković and Dominique Gauthier, among others. She currently lives and works in Paris. Her work, exhibited both in France and internationally, has established itself over the years as a distinctive voice in the contemporary textile scene.

Thread is at the heart of her practice. For her, embroidering, weaving, sewing, or assembling are not merely technical skills: these gestures become tools for thought, memory, and transformation. Through monumental installations, textile drawings, and sculptural compositions, Brankica Žilović constructs sensitive territories where the personal and the collective, history and the imagination intersect.

Shaped by her experience of the former Yugoslavia and by questions of displacement, borders, and transmission, the artist develops a body of work deeply rooted in cartography. But the maps she draws do not seek to delineate the world: they reveal its fractures, its invisible currents, and the fragile bonds that unite people. Her networks of threads evoke constellations as much as nervous systems, archipelagos as much as migration routes.

In her work, the repetition of the gesture becomes a form of meditation. The notions of forgetting, loss, or disappearance are never viewed as ends in themselves, but as the possible conditions for a new beginning. Textiles, long relegated to the margins of art history, acquire narrative and political power under her hand. They become a language capable of recounting the wounds of history as well as the possibilities of resilience.

Between real geography and inner landscape, Brankica Žilović thus composes a humanistic body of work where each thread seems to connect scattered memories. Her creations invite us to think of the world as a shifting fabric, made up of encounters, transmissions, and interdependencies. They remind us that all cartography is also a sensitive projection, and that the most essential territories are sometimes those we carry within ourselves.