#162: Nika Radić 

Friday, 11 September 2026, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

Nika Radić has moved between different media in her work but stayed true to topics for longer periods of time. Her interest in communication between people and how art is used as language drove also her theoretical writings and eventually led to hypnosis, understood as a means of communicating with the subconscious. Hypnosis became her main interest for a number of years and she also used hypnotic methods to structure her exhibitions and video works. Through the work on the film Everything Was Green, in which she hypnotized participants to see a happy future, her focus shifted to plants. She started noticing plants in our environment and, since then, employs her work to oppose plant blindness, our inherent tendency to not notice plants or to see them as inanimate objects.

Kind of like, 2003, 05:26 min
A single shot with a fixed camera shows two people having a simple dinner at a small table. Only their hands and the food are visible. The audible parts of their conversation consist of filler words that carry no meaning: “well…”, “you know”, “it’s like…”, yet their communication can clearly be observed. One of Radić’s earliest videos, the work shows her interest in structuralist theories of communication, the idea that meaning is not carried by individual words but is equally produced by the relations between speakers, by gestures, rhythm, and the context. The question remains how much of this communication is actually happening between the two people, and how much of it is the observer’s expectation.

We Travel a Lot, 2017, 17:31min
What do we look at when we travel, and why do we photograph it? The film is a slideshow of images taken during a residency in Japan. Tourist snapshots soon give way to questions of what it means to be foreign in a country, how a foreigner comes to fit in, and, eventually, what barriers present themselves to migrants. The artist narrates in Japanese, a language she does not speak. The idea is borrowed from Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, in which Eiji Okada performs in French although he didn’t speak the language. We Travel a Lot uses this to produce a comparable unease. The narration sounds slightly off to native speakers, and is pure sound to those who don’t understand Japanese, accentuating the gap between the sound of a language and its meaning.

Message, 2016, 15:00 min
Message documents an experiment in the collaborative production of an artwork. Radić built a large-scale geometric installation in a gallery and invited a first visitor to interpret it. The piece was then altered to resemble that interpretation more closely. The process was repeated roughly thirty times with different visitors of different ages, professions, and backgrounds, but all professionally involved in contemporary art. Each gave their interpretation of the found stage of the work and each time the work was changed accordingly. The film combines interviews with the participants and time-lapse documentation of the installation’s transformation. Because each visitor’s interpretation was shaped by their own current interests, the installation gradually became a cross-section of the concerns circulating in contemporary art at the time of its making. The experiment marks the beginning of Radić’s interest in difficulties of communication that would later lead her to study hypnosis as a model of conveying meaning.

Gallery, 2022, 3:50 min
Made as a sketch for a sculpture, the video documents the development of a piece that uses trompe-l’oeil images of a gallery interior to seal off a space visitors cannot enter. They could only hear voices from within the structure. Showing this development, Gallery renders visible a glitch in perception comparable to the moment of entering a hypnotic trance. The soundtrack consists of fragments of sentences that seem, briefly, to cohere into sense before dissolving among other fragments. The work mimics the confusion Milton Erickson identified as the first stage of hypnotic induction and illustrates Radić’s years-long engagement with hypnosis.

My Voice Will Go With You, 2022, 04:58 min
My Voice Will Go With You is a quote from Milton Erickson, the psychiatrist who introduced hypnosis into psychotherapy. Erickson structured a hypnotic session in three stages: first he disoriented his clients making them give up their habitual perception, then he induced a state of focused concentration, and finally he delivered a message that was deliberately incomplete or metaphorical, so that the listener would complete it with their own experience. A first version of the video was made as a two-channel installation for the exhibition of the same name at the Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, in 2020, and a single-channel version was made two years later. They document a hypnotic session structured according to Erickson’s three stages. Radić’s interest in Erickson’s practice was triggered by the parallels between Erickson’s session structure and how she understands art to function as a communication medium: the leap of attention required to perceive a work, the concentration needed, and the way a work’s meaning is completed by the viewer rather than fixed by the artist.

Everything Was Green, 2023, 15:38 min
Around twenty people were hypnotized to see a positive future. They were put into a trance and given instructions on how to pay attention to their experience, without any suggestions other than that they were in the future and felt good. This became a process of recording collective wishes and desires, but indirectly also fears. Unexpectedly, the majority of participants visualized a positive future as taking place in a green, natural environment.
After each hypnotic session, an interview was filmed in which participant described their experience. These videos became part of the exhibition, while the digital prints depicted the gallery space as overgrown with plants.
This project became the starting point of an ongoing engagement with plants and the environment.

Rhythm, 2025, 12:38 min
Rhythm juxtaposes two modes of life on Earth: a Berlin techno parade approaching its final stop on the one side, and plants growing and appearing to dance over time on the other. The two-channel work was made as a video installation.
Rhythm takes the concept of plant blindness as its starting point. The term was introduced in the late 1990s by Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee to describe the human tendency to overlook plants, to treat them as inert objects, or to see them as less valuable forms of life. An important factor in this lack of perception is the different tempo in which humans and plants live. In Rhythm, the playback speed alternates between motion and stillness. At times, humans are brought to a standstill, while plant movement is accelerated into choreography. At other times, the plants don’t move while people dance to a rhythm that we can recognize. Viewers become part of the changing rhythm and are invited to reconsider their own perceptual habits about life around them.

Nika Radić (*1968) is a visual artist living between Berlin and Zagreb, Croatia, where she teaches a sculpture class at the Academy of Fine Arts.

She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including: An Intimacy With Strangers, Kindl, Berlin (2026), 1/3, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2025), 24/7 Arbeit zwischen Sinnstiftung und Entgrenzung, Kunsthaus Graz (2024), What’s Cooking, Helmhaus, Zürich (2023), Futures, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2023),     Extended Present, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2022), Alles war Grün, CLB, Berlin (2022), I Will Count From Ten to One, National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb (2022), My Voice Will Go With You, Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin (2020). Radić was also a resident at a number of residencies including the Goethe Institutes Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto (2017), Arts Link at the Vanderbilt University in Nashville (2016), Living Art Museum Reykjavik (2004) and others.

She graduated in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and in art history from the University of Vienna.