Bojna polja is a multilayered art book that radically questions our consumption-driven world. In the interplay between artistic abstraction and social critique, Jelena Micić demonstrates how everyday materials—from plastic packaging to remnants of industrial mass production—develop their own language in striking installations. Featuring contributions by renowned authors such as Elke Krasny, Dejan Vasić, Lorena Tabares Salamanca, and Kristin Romberg, and a conversation with Heather Davis the creative process is unveiled as a mirror reflecting societal labor, consumption, and environmental challenges. Bojna polja invites readers to discover the transformation of waste into a form of artistic subversion, opening up a critical discourse on the inextricable links between body, capital, and ecology. This book serves as a provocative exploration of how art, as a political act, can contribute to emancipation in a world marked by industrial overproduction and ecological crisis. 

Art, Labor, and the Politics of Consumption (book presentation)

Depot - Kunst und Diskussion Mittwoch, 2. April 2025, 19.00  

Jelena Micić’s artistic practice examines entanglements of labor, consumption, and the metabolic flows of capital. Engaging feminist materialism, post-socialist transitions, and the afterlives of industrial production, how can art render visible the toxic persistence of synthetic matter and the infrastructures of global value extraction? How might non-aligned histories disrupt hegemonic aesthetic and economic orders?

Jelena Micić, artist, Vienna
Elke Krasny, cultural theorist, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Kristin Romberg, art historian, University of Illinois, USA (online)
Heidrun Rosenberg, art historian, University of Vienna
Lorena Tabares Salamanca, writer, curator, Colombia / Portugal

Jelena Micić, Bojna polja, Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst 2025

Art, Labor, and the Politics of Consumption (book presentation). Photos: DEPOT 

[1] Civilization, as a universalist campaign, has turned every notion of “difference” and “separation” into practice through its methods of implementation: colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of

Race, Borderlines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 

[2] Esther Leslie, author of Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry, argues that artificiality is the counterpart to the transformation of nature. In this regard, she states: “All that exists and can exist is natural, but processes of deriving complex compounds from reactions produce substitutes, analogues, imitations and duplicates, which, because of the synthetic operations that bring them into being, seem to remain forever synthetic.” Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 7.