B I O

Sonja Islamovic (born in Bosnia and Herzegovina) lives and works in Malmö, Sweden. Through her life she experienced narratives and perspectives of exile from childhood in former Yugoslavia and has since then lived in several cities and countries since graduating upper secondary school in Sweden; Oslo, Brighton, London, Paris and Hong Kong.

She explores questions of belonging through plurality and a contrapuntal lens and finds her home through introspection in Nature. Memory, and its inevitable remembering/forgetting, is through impermanence, explored using organic matter and time based explorations through the medium of Textiles. She explores ecological perspectives underlying her practice through the use of materials and processes, as she is trained in weaving and has recently started developing ‘e' textiles and explorations into sound and digital media. She is selfrepresented and open to collaborating with galleries.

After witnessing so much waste and many unsustainable practices in the fashion and textiles industry during her years interning and working for textiles and fashion houses in Paris and London, she was forced to reassess and question her place within it. During her time at the Royal College of Art she experimented with bio materials as a means to arrive at new methods of working, but truly her skills in design and art are craft based, as she has a background in weaving from Brighton University on the BA Textiles with Business Studies course. At Brighton, aside from her studio work, her first essay was "Can Ethical Design Change the World?" While her final dissertation accompanying her show was "Why do Artists Collaborate?" Which was awarded a first and has brought her to socially engaged work and the importance of community engagement. Her vast interests into anthropology have also brought her to wish to travel to remote places, exploring textiles and is currently planning a longer stay on Iceland.

She also has invited opportunity for interdisciplinary and collaboration, which she is currently undertaking with harpist Frederica Vieira Campos, which begun while Frederica was a student at  he Royal College of Music in London whom she met while studying in London. Their collaboration, starting in 2020, is cross-pollinating textiles, music and computational arts. Henrique Ferrara is an interdisciplinary artist based in Porto, Portugal and is supporting this project through physical computing and programming.