Hana Miletić
Croatian artist Hana Miletić (1982, Zagreb) lives in Brussels and works in part in Zagreb. She successively studied Art History at the VUB and Photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In her studio Hana Miletić creates a constant interplay between photography and weaving, connecting the two media from both a technical and conceptual point of view. Miletić captures elements of the degraded environment we live in, caring for their ecology, stories and resilience. In this way she confirms an equal interest in representation, reproduction and production. Her empathetic approach to reality is both documentary and activating.
Hana Miletić models her hand-woven textiles after her own photographs, which in turn refer to social interactions and fault lines in public space. She uses the weaving process, which requires a great deal of time and dedication, as a counterweight to socio-economic trends such as acceleration and standardisation. She sees the careful weaving and reconstruction of an image as a gesture of care and restoration to reflect on social issues. Her 'repairs' in the urban space – restoring street photographs from a broken window or a damaged car mirror – emphasise her social commitment. In that sense the result of her weaving process is not only artistic and material but above all metaphorical. She therefore makes her hand-woven and hand-knitted textiles with recycled knitting that she collects and recovers here and there.
Simultaneously she also examines the history of myriad fabrics, silks and weaving processes because over many centuries - and via migration - they have determined the lives of generations of workers and seamstresses in countless workshops all over the world. By reconstructing old images with various textiles she attempts to reconstruct a piece of lost history, resulting in patchwork quilts with recurring patterns and colours. In this way she tries to make the material used tactile again with her installations. It is work to look at, it is abstract but the artist's goal is that you can also 'feel' it with your eyes because it brings history to life.
In line with this she created a weaving studio in Brussels with community weaving workshops. This allows her to connect even more broadly with a craft rooted in female genealogy while its social implications lead to greater insight and affinity. By focusing on concepts such as scarcity, damage and obstacles she seeks alternative social ways to counter harmful customs and ideologies.