Aleksandar Duravcevic is an artist with a wide-ranging practice that stretches from video to installations and painstakingly-executed drawings. His works probe issues such as mortality, memory and identity. These are subjects that he tackles from a unique perspective, having been brought up in Montenegrin tribal society, before fleeing his homeland on the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In 2015, Duravcevic gained significant acclaim when he was selected as the artist representing Montenegro in its pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Duravcevic’s works feature in a wide range of public collections, including in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, New York and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

After leaving Montenegro, Duravcevic entered Italy as a refugee, subsequently studying fine art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and then the celebrated printmaking school, Il Bisonte, in the same city. Duravcevic then joined some of his family who had moved to New York, studying at Pratt Institute. He lives and works in Brooklyn. Despite-or more realistically because of-these travels farther and farther from his homeland, Duravcevic’s national identity remains a key to his work. Even in Montenegro, he had been conscious of the complexities of identity, as his mother was Montenegrin Orthodox and his father Albanian Catholic. Traveling through the West, he has become increasingly aware of the precariously tribal natures of nationality and identity, distilled into the mural Identity, 2015, shown with bronze letters at Venice Biennale.