Email: info@margaretakern.com
Insta: @sea_._monster
Still from Are You Ready? Lecture performance, Birkbeck Cinema, 2018. Photography: Ilenia Arosio.
Margareta Kern (she/her) is an artist working across performance, moving image and installation. Born in Bosnia-Herzegovina/Yugoslavia, Kern migrated to the UK in the early 1990s as a political asylum seeker. This lived experience of displacement and conflict profoundly shapes her work and engagement with themes of power, ideology and resistance, as well as with masquerade, mimicry and mischief, to imagine and create transformative alternatives. Her multi-layered practice confronts the pressing question of what subversion means in an era where right-wing populism and pervasive militarism have utilised performativity to alarming effect, cosplaying itself into reality.
Currently, Kern is completing a practice-led PhD at the University of the Arts London, where she explores 'diasporic mischief / dijasporik misćif’ - a term she coined to describe a playful, subversive and critical strategy of artistic resistance that incorporates humour, irony, overidentification, p/re-enactment, autofiction and mulitlinguality, often through a hybrid medium that blurs boundaries between performance, lecture, multi-media installation and everyday actions.
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), lecture performance at the Academy of Fine Art Vienna (2023).
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 (2023/2024).
Kern’s text ‘Dream State: hugs, dreams and British psychopolitics’ is published by the Harun Farocki Institute and the Journal of Visual Culture, 2020.
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.
Kern currently lives in Cornwall and London.
Website (c) Margareta Kern, 2025. Please contact for an up-to-date detailed CV.