I am a Croatian-born artist based in Amsterdam. My practice is rooted in performance and extends into multimedia installations, video, and staged experiences. Drawing on lived experiences of Balkan traditions and the tension between Eastern and Western cultural frameworks, I use the body as a site where visible and imperceptible forms of violence and desire converge.  

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Everyone Wants to be Desired, No One Wants to Desire,  2025





Photo: Camila Carrera
Performers: Isabel Narezo Balzaretti, Roberto Mosqueda and Ines Borovac
Sound production: Harry Castle 
Styling and Costumes: Salma Carbajal





Everyone Wants to be Desired, No One Wants To Desire


Staged between sedation and excess, the performance explores a struggle of bodies to express emotions, conflict and desire in a highly disembodied and optimised society. Torn between excess and composure, the expression becomes disrupted, smoothened, flattened and risks being completely suppressed. Therefore, to embody excess becomes a choreography of confrontation against digital systems of control and contemporary beauty culture who teach us not to show expression. Smoothing out the face to avoid emotion being read as “hysterical” or unprofessional. This pressure aligns with algorithmic and aesthetic norms that favors static, controlled surfaces over expressive, messy embodiment. This is not neutral selfcare; it is culturally conditioned emotional discipline that erases affect from the face and body. In order to contrast the sedation of expression, the performance utilises the melodramatic expression of telenovelas.


Serie I: Hard  Falls and Soft Truths, 2025/2026



Camera & Production:  Ramón Jiménez Cárdenas

Special gratitude to all the kind people from Oaxaca de Juárez who wellcomed me in their homes, hotels and museum stairs and allowing me to fall. 



Soft Falls and Hard Truths


During her stay at Oaxaca, Borovac was researching the representation of a female body in telenovela’s. Inspired by the trope scene of female characters falling down the stairs in the video of artist falling, the falls happen in reverse; the body is not injured, it is restored. Having filmed in more then twenty private homes, the process involved negotiating the trust of strangers, transforming intimate spaces into stages of vulnerability. The repetitive act of falling is interpreted as a commitment to the embodiment of soap operas, which have been present in the artist’s life since childhood, thus forming part of her Latin affinity as a Croatian. This affinity, also the subject of her research at La Clínica, stems from parallelisms found between a Balkan and a Latin subjectivity. These territories share a history of subordination and rebellion against the numerous empires that have governed their territories (in Croatia, the Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Republic of Venice, and Yugoslavia, among others; in Mexico, the Aztec Empire, the Spanish Empire, among other postcolonial regimes such as England, France, and the USA); and this without mentioning a shared Catholicism between both nations.



A Kill Is Only a Dinner, and Dinner Is Not the Entire World,  2025



Photo: Luka Pešun


Performers: Cosme Fodor, Šimun Stankov, Nino Bokan, Domagoj Obadić, Choir INA
Production: Generator of Multidisciplinary Co-Productions (GMK)
Curators: Antonela Solenički,Tea Matanović
Text: Antonela Solenički

A Kill is Only a Dinner, and Dinner is Not Entire World (2025)


Inspired by Anne Boyer’s When the Lambs Rise Up Against the Bird of Prey, this project begins from the lamb’s position of constant risk, where survival depends on collective sensing and atunement. Boyer’s observation that the predator mistakes a kill for the whole world mirrors today’s systems of extraction, where those in power entrap the vulnerable within cycles of appetite. In collaboration with performers and the choir of 40 framing the walls of gallery while singing the Requiem, the artist embodies multiple preys to stage direct power dynamics between predator and prey, exposing how fear shapes bodies, movement, and group identity. Within the flock, time distorts, senses sharpen, and survival emerges as both a strategy and a shared choreography.


Before the Cock Crows,  2025


Photo:  Vincent Van Den Hende
View of a live pefromance in FRAC Champagne-Ardene, 2025

Performers: Mathilde Hatton, Joaline Simasotchi 
Sound recordings: Maurane Gabriël
Music production: Bea 1991
Sound concept: Maurane Gabriël, Bea 1991 and me
Curatorial advisor: Juliette Mirabito

Before the Cock Crows (2025)



Transitional period between night and day is often depicted as a time of transformation of human nature. This liminal period marked by the crowing of the rooster opens a window to the mystery, change, transformation and crossing between two worlds. As the rise of capitalistic productivity cycle and time accelerationism we have lost the liminal space of dawn and dreams, inspiration and imagination connected to it. The artist is uses the charging potential of this moment as a metaphor for the death of the old values and the birth of new ones. By infusing the performance with Balkan magic ritualism, where the rooster plays a crucial role, a performing a ritual of claiming back the spaces of the liminal where resistance of the oppressed bodies, creative energy, and the subversion of rigid social structures thrives.


CE400275200HR, 2024




View from Croatian Pavillion, Venice Biennial, 2024
Invited by Vlatka Horvat to contribute to “By the Means of Hands








Why Wouldn’t You Date Me?,  2024






Photo: Barbara Radelja
View of a 2 channel installation in Gragare Rotterdam, 2024


Creative Coding: Ananya Panda
Graphic Design: Karla Žlimen
Produced with the support of CBK Rotterdam 

Why Wouldn’t You Date Me? (2024), Multimedia installation


From ancient times, the female body has served as a currency to foster homosocial relations under the disguise of marriage. A system rendering the young woman’s consent meaningless in a world of violent, patriarchal norms. Young ladies would be socially forced to find a husband, with her only act of emancipation in many European rituals being the gesture of handing over an apple to the chosen one - symbolizing her consent and leaving her one bite away from marriage.

Today, this symbolic apple has evolved into Apple products and dating apps, commodifying love and sex. These platforms now trade not only female bodies but the digital footprints of all users, enhancing capitalist surveillance. The performance Why Wouldn’t You Date Me? by the Amsterdam and Croatia based artist Ines Borovac draws parallels with historical practices, through a performative act where control over personal data is reclaimed. By adapting Croatian courting customs, Borovac engaged in a series of monitored dates every evening from 17 - 20 July. The dates were live-streamed at Garage Rotterdam and the dating process will be gamified by giving the artist’s home country (Croatia) the power to influence the dates via an interactive app on their phones.



COLLO  - redancing tradition, 2021


Photo:  Nicole Marnati



Dancers: Ema Šajatović, Ema Kani, Nino Bokan, Una Matija Štalcar, Vid Vugrinec
DJ: Bruno Bolfan
Music production: Marko Milas
DOP: Urh Pirc

COLLO - redancing tradition, 2021, Multimedia installation


Even though traditional Croatian olkdances are rarely still danced outside of the stage, bodies are ethnographic archives of movements and behaviours that are inherited across many generations of family, culture and society. Through performative design research in a collaboration with the dance therapist author identified the emodied gender and social norms embedded in the Kolo (a basic folkdance popular among Slavic people). It was then re-choreographed with a woman (kolovođica) as leader and based on movements that express vulnerability, sexuality and self-expression. Techno music and tie-dyed embroidered clothing contemporise the project to today’s rave aesthetic. Challenging the often conservative and patriotic field of heritage, the project expresses the need and ability to evolve rather than discard cultural traditions.

Text: Nadine Botha 


Body Hub, 2020





Photo: Nika Mokoš


Movement advisor: Simon Bus

Body Hub, 2020


Body Hub is a multimedia installation and platform that provides tools and space for activating a holistic workspace aimed at cultivating a healthier everyday world. Drawing on the contemporary body–technology relationship within typical work environments, the project offers ethically embodied methodologies for future socio-technological developments. Framed through an absurdist lens, Body Hub exaggerates and distorts familiar workplace logics, using humour and estrangement to expose the contradictions embedded in productivity, care, and optimisation.




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