Milica Tomić

Milica Tomić (born 1960) also known as Milica Tomic, is a Serbian-born contemporary artist and educator. Her artistic practice is research-based and includes working in the mediums of photography, video, installation art and discursive, educational art, performance, and socio-political engagement. She serves as the Chair of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology in Austria. She has lived in Berlin, Belgrade, and Graz.

Career Tomić was born in 1960 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She graduated with a bachelor's degree (1990) and master's degree (1994) in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Arts in Belgrade.

She has been awarded many artist-in-residency opportunities including at Artpace (2004) in San Antonio, United States; and the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Programme (2006). In 2011, she had a fellowship as a Humanities Center–SiCa Arts writer/practitioner in residence at Stanford University in Stanford, California.

Her work was part of the group exhibition, Global Feminisms (2007) at the Brooklyn Museum, curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin.

Since 2014, Tomić is the Chair of the Institute for Contemporary Art (within the Faculty of Architecture) at the Graz University of Technology in Graz, Styria, Austria. From 2014 to 2015, she was a professor at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in Trondheim, Norway.

Artwork

Tomić’s work centers on researching, unearthing and bringing to public debate issues related to political and economic violence, trauma and social amnesia, with particular attention to the short circuit between intimacy and politics. As a response to the commitment to social change and the new forms of collectivity it engenders, Tomić has made a marked shift from individual to collective artistic practice.

Her work "I am Milica Tomic" (1999) was created as both a performance and video installation, where she would repeat "I am Milica Tomic" paired with a different national identity, said in the local language.

Her work "One day, Instead of One Night, a Burst of Machine-Gun Fire will Flash, if Light Cannot Come Otherwise" (2010), was performed at the ISEA International's ISEA2010: 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art in Dortmund, Germany.

She is a founding member of the Yugoslav art and theory group, Grupa Spomenik (or Monument Group), and founder of the cross-disciplinary project and working group of Four Faces of Omarska.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions 1999, Milica Tomić, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck 2005, Milica Tomic, Experimental Art Foundation Gallery, Adelaide 2006, Alone / Reading Capital, Artspace Sydney, Australia 2007, Politics of Memory, Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art, Pristina 2010, Milica Tomić, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia 2012, One Day, Turku Art Museum, Turku, Finland 2014, Artists Film International: Burak Delier, Tejal Shah, Milica Tomic, Whitechapel Gallery, London 2016, Cinema, School and War of Independence, Charim Gallery, Vienna 2020, The Small Letter, Charim Gallery, Vienna