Email: info@margaretakern.com
Insta: @sea_._monster
Are You Ready? Margareta Kern, 2018. Photography: Ilenia Arosio.
Margareta Kern is a visual artist working across performance, moving image, and installation. Her practice emerges from sustained critical and embodied research into how collective imaginaries and subjectivities are constructed, contested, and mobilised amid overlapping crises of neoliberal capitalism and climate breakdown. Kern’s lived experience of displacement, migration and conflict – having migrated from Bosnia-Herzegovina/Yugoslavia to the UK as an asylum seeker in the 1990s – informs her deep engagement with themes of power, ideology, and resistance.
At the core of Kern’s work is an interrogation of subversion in an era where right-wing populism and pervasive militarism have deployed performativity to an alarming effect – cosplaying themselves into reality. Through her multi-layered practice Kern examines how these forces appropriate cinematic and performative techniques to script themselves into existence, and how artistic practice might disrupt, reclaim, or rewrite such tactics.
Kern’s projects combine archival research, investigative fieldwork, and embedded experimentation, operating at the threshold between documentary, fiction and staged reality. Through strategies of essayist montage, speculative pre-enactment, and subversive mimesis, they probe the unstable thresholds where ideology becomes perceptible and where it might be destabilised.
Recent works like Are You Ready? (2018) on the parasitic mimesis of crypto-fascist aesthetics, and Thursday War (ongoing) on militarist performativity – expose how power masquerades as freedom or security to embed itself in daily life. Through performance and moving image, Kern’s practice traces the violent seams of these tangled scripts, testing how art can hack, mimic, and (un)rehearse them to pry open spaces for mischievous re-imaginings.
Margareta Kern, Performance Intervention, outside one of the world’s largest arms fair, DSEI, London, 2023
Since graduating from Goldsmiths (1998) Kern’s work has 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.