* Opening of the exhibition: April 23, 2026 at 7 pm *
What remains when history falls silent?
Ana Bilankov's exhibition Odjek tišine (Echoing the Silence) takes as its starting point a forgotten chapter in the history of Mediterranean migrations – an exile to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt during the World War II – and turns it into a multilayered exploration of memory, displacement, and absence. Paraphrasing Frederic Jameson, who in his book The Political Unconscious asserts that history is "what hurts", an actual force resisting us because it is not susceptible to our desires or projects, the exhibition invites us to dive into the painful present and to transcend it by witnessing and refusing to forget it.
At the center of the exhibition, a new three-channel video installation Clapping is set up with large portraits of children, filmed in the Sinai Desert, floating on three suspended screens. Children's apparently innocent game of launching plastic aircrafts becomes a metaphor for the ongoing war games taking place above the same geographical locations. Intense gaze of a concerned boy and the sound of his slow motion clapping raise the question: who is clapping for whom here – and why?
Alongside the award-winning film, Chasing the Sun: El Shatt, which was screened at more than thirty international festivals, the exhibition also introduces new formats: archival photographs from the Croatian History Museum used in the film now placed in LED light boxes, and the photo collage series, Imaginary Bodies & Imaginary Landscapes, which questions the boundaries between reality, memory, and hope.
Exhibition curator: Martina Munivrana
About the artist
Ana Bilankov is visual artist and filmmaker, born in Zagreb, living and working in Berlin. In her conceptual and research-oriented art practice covering experimental film, photography, video installations and text, Bilankov examines themes of dislocation, migration, memory and identity.
Bilankov’s works were exhibited at international art venues, such as ICA London, Galleria d'Arte Moderna Palermo, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, ICA Glasgow, Arsenal Berlin, Photon Gallery Ljubljana, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, National Museum Gdansk, Dazibao Montreal, Collegio Armeno Venice, at the 1st Moscow Biennale, and shown as public projection on the Manhattan Bridge, New York.
Bilankov studied Art History and German Language and Literature at the University of Zagreb, and finished postgraduate studies program "Fine Art in Context" at the Berlin University of the Arts (MA); she was artist in residence at the Watershed Media Center Bristol, the Moscow House of Photography, the Pioneer Works and the Residency Unlimited New York, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Q21 Vienna and the Hangar Lisbon, supported by grants from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture.
Her award-winning film, Chasing the Sun: El Shatt, has been screened at more than thirty international festivals, including Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, Kassel Dokfest, 25 FPS Zagreb, BIEFF Bucharest, London Shorts, Glasgow Shorts, Achtung Berlin, Arkipel Jakarta, Beijing Shorts, L'Europe autour de l'Europe Paris, Sole Luna Doc Palermo, Ismailia Film Festival Egypt, and Istanbul Experimental.
