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Helena Klakočar Vukšić

 

ABOUT

Bshr Ali Graphic

Born in Bosnia, Tuzla, lived in Slovenia, studied graphic art at the Art Academy of Zagreb, Croatia and Film animation in Tilburg, The Netherlands.

 

She was successful as a comics author and designer of posters and animation films in Croatia. She was working as an art organizer in Zagreb and leader of the artistic group Zzot.

 

In summer 1991 she went on a sailing holiday with her husband and two-year-old daughter. Their return from Greece was prolonged because of the outburst of the war in former Yugoslavia. On a small catamaran during the winter she was capturing daily life and memories of her homeland in drawings and text, depicted in her award-winning graphic novel Rough Sea which is translated into several languages (French, Italian, Slovenian, and Croatian) and published in Brussels, Trieste, Ljubljana, Beograd, Zagreb. In 1992 she moved with her husband and child to the Netherlands, where she continued her diary with observations of immigrant life in Netherlands (Restless Sea 2).

 

She made many shorter comics which were exhibited or published on internet and published one children picture book Big journey , 2003, Aristej, Maribor, Slovenia.

 

Her recent project Moisture, Frost and Salt (MFS) was partly published in a few magazines (REČ, Beograd, ZAREZ, Zagreb etc.). It is a longer story about 3 activists who are trying to change the world. On that way they overcame many failures but, at the end, they achieve their main goal: no wars - no refugees.

 

Balkan route is one of the side stories in MFS project, inspired by the debates and public dialogs round the recent refugees flow on the Balkan. For the Croatian it was the „first contact“ with refugees from far East and Africa . This project is in the work process, the story will continue with brainstorming sessions with the refugees who pass Balkan route and came to the Netherlands. The theme of those meeting are their past, their adventures on the way to Eu and how they imagine the „best case scenarios“ for our common future.

 

Today she is living and working on relation Croatia – the Netherlands.

 

 

Awards:

2000 - Prix Alph-Art du Meilleur Album Étranger for graphic novel Passage en douce, Festival d'Angoulême and Prix du Radio Info, France

Stipendium Centre de la Livre, Paris, France

2001 - Work stipendium Fonds voor Kunst en Architectuur, Amsterdam

2002 - "The picture which was never taken”, Helsinki, Finland, lecture on symposia about graphic novels

2003 - Guest artist Academia Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany.

2016 - Residence in Paris Recollects

WORK

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