IVANA DAMA
The Politics of Breath
There is something symptomatic in the way artists from conflict zones are presented: the question of trauma can occupy a central place, and rightly so, told and retold until the work itself stands as testimony. Or, conversely, it is carefully kept at a distance. Ivana Dama does neither. She was born and raised in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her early childhood during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. The memories of her childhood, time spent in air-raid shelters, the sounds and vibrations of warning sirens, helped shape her interest in air and sound as her main mediums. These are not incidental biographical details; they are raw material she works with coldly, without staging them.
What led her to focus on sound was the moment she first heard archival recordings made during the bombing, including the sounds of air-raid sirens. Until then, she had not realized how deeply those sonic memories remained embedded within her. Images of the events had never affected her in the same way, but hearing those sound recordings produced an immediate physical response.The image documents. Sound reactivates. This is not a hierarchy but a difference in register. And it is that register she has been exploring ever since, often using low frequencies and analog electronics to restore sound's full materiality and reveal its almost tactile dimension. She creates connections between the corporeal, the physiological, and the political.
Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, 2024
Her most recent work embodies this logic. Breathing Alarms (2026), currently on view at the Wende Museum in Culver City, is an installation set within the museum's East German guardhouse. The piece centers on surveillance, atmosphere, and the politics of breath. The choice of location is not incidental: the Wende Museum is dedicated to the history of the Cold War, its collections gathering artifacts, archives, and everyday objects from the former Soviet bloc. Grafting such a piece inside a former East German guardhouse is a way of short-circuiting the regime of representation. We are no longer confronted with something that evokes control, we are entirely inside it.
The title itself says something precise. An alarm that breathes. Or a breath that alarms. Air as a simultaneous vector of life and imminent threat. This parameter is a constant in Ivana Dama's practice. Her current research explores the development of a tool capable of signaling the urgency of both social and ecological crises, foregrounding the inextricable connections between the two, given that they most often occur simultaneously and likely arise from the same root causes (as intersectional theories suggest). The air raid siren of her Belgrade childhood and contemporary ecological collapse thus share a common structure: thresholds crossed, bodies exposed, warnings that arrive but are rarely heeded.
Wende Museum, Culver City, 2026
What makes Ivana Dama's work so singular is precisely that it does not negotiate between the intimate and the political, nor between devices and their field of action. We feel her works before we can fully grasp their stakes. This is where the physicality of her sonic installations resides. And through that physicality, we also better understand the central question running through much of her research: understanding cannot be separated from a form of experience. Some things may be more relevant and more powerful when felt rather than explained.
Wende Museum, Culver City, 2026
What makes Ivana Dama's work so singular is precisely that it does not negotiate between the intimate and the political, nor between devices and their field of action. We feel her works before we can fully grasp their stakes. This is where the physicality of her sonic installations resides. And through that physicality, we also better understand the central question running through much of her research: understanding cannot be separated from a form of experience. Some things may be more relevant and more powerful when felt rather than explained.
Shoutout LA — Meet Ivana Dama
https://shoutoutla.com/meet-ivana-dama-sound-artist-and-researcher/
Wende Museum — Ivana Dama: The Air Belongs to the Children https://wendemuseum.org/event/frameworks-ivana-dama-the-air-belongs-to-the-children/
Wende Museum — Breathing Alarms
https://wendemuseum.org/exhibition/ivana-dama-breathing-alarms/
Artist’s website : https://www.ivanadama.com