Drawing from the post-socialist landscape of and attitudes about the former Yugoslavia, I analyze collective memory politics and the archive. I work in various disciplines, creating in-between spaces and concentrating on objects, architectural features, political photographs, and advertisements to mimic the geographic and political placement of a departed country.

Dissecting the dissonance between national attitudes as well as personal feelings of displacement, the images and historical design in my pieces memorialize a long-gone environment and reflect upon contemporary disillusionment. Ultimately, as a study of absence, aesthetic markers, and political relics, my practice focuses on the transformation of national memory.

Alena Mehić (b. 1995, Zavidovići; lives in Nashville, TN) examines ideas of utopia, nation-building, and the archive. Working between disciplines, she collages and abstracts various personal, political, and commercial media in an effort to both commemorate and speculate.

She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2021) and her BFA from Middle Tennessee State University (2017). She was a recipient of the 2021 Master of Fine Art Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture from the Dedalus Foundation in New York, had a solo exhibition (Dark Humor) at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, TN in September 2022, and will be an artist-in-residence at Loghaven in 2023.