Email: info@margaretakern.com
Insta: @sea_._monster
Still from the performance ‘Are You Ready’, Birkbeck Cinema, 2018. Photography: Ilenia Arosio.
Margareta Kern (b. Bosnia-Herzegovina) is an award-winning visual artist working across performance, moving image, photography and sound. She often draws on performative strategies of re-enactment, role-play and satire, investigative and archival research, as well as a lived experience of migration and conflict, to create ground breaking art that challenges dominant mythologies and blurs boundaries between art and activism. Her work is feminist, decolonial, and deeply committed to an experimental, radical, diasporic imagination.
Since graduating from Goldsmiths (1998) her works have been exhibited and screened extensively, most notably: prestigious BFI/decibel residency ‘Necessary Journeys’ at Tate Modern (2005), international touring solo exhibition ‘Clothes for Living & Dying’ (2008-10), major commission from National Media Museum (2009), ‘The Body State’ video winning renowned October Salon Award (2013), British Council-funded major international touring solo exhibition GUESTures & first museum solo exhibition in Berlin (2019), Whitstable Biennale & Birkbeck School of Law commission (2019-2020), performance at the Academy of Fine Art Vienna (2023). She is currently completing a PhD Thesis at the University of the Arts London on what she calls ‘a diasporic mischief’ - a feminist and decolonial strategy of artistic resistance.
Kern’s work has been supported by the Arts Council England, the National Media Museum, Leverhulme Trust, the British Film Institute, and the Croatian Ministry of Culture. Most recently she has been awarded the Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice Grant (2024).
In 2022, her text ‘Dream State: hugs, dreams and British psychopolitics’ was published by the Harun Farocki Institute and the Journal of Visual Culture.
She is a founding member of Artists' Union England, and is part of Precarious Workers Brigade, a UK-based collective campaigning against precarisation in culture and education.
Margareta Kern was born in Yugoslavia, and grew up in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which she left in 1992 as a seventeen-year-old due to war, subsequently seeking political asylum and settling in the UK, where she has been based since. She currently lives in Cornwall and London.
Web-site updated March, 2024. Please contact for an up-to-date detailed CV.