Željka Blakšić

Željka Gita Blakšić (aka Gita Blak) is a visual artist and filmmaker working with moving image, performative archival practices, and countercultural histories. She uses analogue lens-based media (photography, 16mm film), prints, and artists’ books to explore the tensions between personal and collective histories on the edge of erasure.

Željka’s practice emerged from music and performance rooted in 1990s youth subculture in post-Yugoslav Croatia, where she was part of Zagreb’s all-female noise-punk band The Schizoid Wiklers. As part of broader anarcho- and eco-movements, the group rejected pervasive ethno-nationalism and sexism. This experimental environment shaped early methodologies of resistance that continue to inform Blakšić’s artistic practice today.

Centering spontaneity, rebellion, and play, her work begins with found objects, old magazines, garments, and discarded educational 16mm films. She subjects images to processes such as collaging, assembling, burning, bleaching, and painting. Through these actions, she seeks transmutation — significant shifts in the physical and chemical properties of materials — while simultaneously extending the life of the archive as a whole. Found footage functions as both evidence and historical trace, which she connects with original moving images and contemporary documents. This process produces forms of self-portraiture in which personal and collective histories intersect and echo broader cultural and historical contexts.

She often collaborates with musicians, activists, urbanists, and students, through workshops and performances, creating sites to practice collectivity within the framework of contemporary art.

Her films have been screened at festivals worldwide. She has recently participated in Art Encounters Biennial 2025: Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales in Timișoara, Romania, curated by Ana Janevski and Tevž Logar; the 17th Gjon Mili Biennial: She who starts the song…,curated by Valentine Umansky at the National Gallery of Kosovo; the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York; and the Visual Studies Workshop Residency in Rochester, NY. Previously, she has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), The Kitchen (New York), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), Reading International Art Festival (UK), AIR Gallery (New York), Anonymous Gallery (New York), Gallery Augusta (Helsinki), Gallery of SESI (São Paulo), and the Khyber Center for the Arts (Halifax).

Selected awards and fellowships include the Green DCP Award at the 25fps Festival (Zagreb), NYFA Film/Video Finalist (New York), Residency Unlimited & NEA Award (New York), Fondazione Pistoletto Residency (Italy), MuseumsQuartier Program (Vienna), Recess Session (New York), A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship (New York), Paula Rhodes Award (New York), and Alserkal Avenue Residency (Dubai). In 2024, she received the Ruprecht Fellowship at the University of Vermont and was a guest speaker in the Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Hartford.

Blakšić holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts (New York) and a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (Croatia).