Minja Feruh's Art of Reclamation: Value in a Disposable Age

In an era of vast overproduction and relentless marketing, late millennials and Gen Z bear the burden of student debt, soaring living costs, and mounting environmental threats. As the pressure to consume intensifies, these generations respond by resisting what they see as a relentless push for novelty. One such voice is Minja Feruh, a Serbian photographer and visual artist whose entire practice hinges on the belief that society’s cast-offs can be transformed into objects of surprising value. She puts it simply: “For me, there is no ‘junk,’ only potential inspiration.” With this simple statement, she articulates a broader generational ethos—a refusal to remain trapped in the buy-discard-replace cycle and a determination to find meaning in what consumer culture has cast aside.

Untitled,(2021) Analogue Collage by Minja Feruh

Feruh’s fascination with discarded materials began in early childhood. “I’ve always had a peculiar taste,” she recalls, “so it was tough to find toys that appealed to me. I started making my own by recycling objects anyone else would consider trash.” While other children preferred pristine store-bought toys, she was drawn to the tactile unpredictability of scraps. She didn’t think of it as anything unusual at the time; it simply felt more fun, more open, more hers. What started as a practical and playful choice became something deeper over time, forming the foundation for how she would later approach making art.

She pours herself into transforming discarded scraps, and her collages are where that passion truly comes to life. Feruh’s instinctive relationship with discarded materials finds its fullest expression in her collages, which are vibrant, sometimes unsettling, and consistently experimental. Her materials carry traces of their former lives, but she treats them as starting points rather than endpoints. “Collage gives you so much freedom in the choice of form, elements, and concept,” she explains. “But it’s also about recycling, and it should be obvious to everyone that this planet has no future without it.” In this sense, collage is more than an artistic technique. It becomes an act of resistance, an aesthetic refusal to accept the idea that the constant pursuit of the new is not only wasteful but also spiritually stifling. A glossy advertisement is engineered to be seen once and thrown away. Cutting it out and placing it into a new composition undermines its original purpose, pulls it out of the capitalist churn, and gives it a fresh voice.

Yet to regard her work as simply upcycled art misses the depth of her process. In her studio, she scatters torn scraps across the floor and works with them—sometimes rearranging until an idea clicks, sometimes letting it percolate over days, and occasionally even meeting it in her dreams. These intuitive, almost dreamlike moments challenge the productivity mindset that demands every spark of creativity be immediately optimized into marketable form. Feruh’s method, though it may seem whimsical, is firmly grounded in critical intent. Working with materials that have exhausted their commercial value, she rebuts the notion that an object’s worth depends solely on its newness. In her hands, a magazine clipping or a forgotten pamphlet gains new meaning as a material for reinvention.

Feruh’s critique extends beyond mere material reuse. She argues that the disposability built into mass consumerism—where products become obsolete within months and entire demographics are marginalized—is symptomatic of a broader systemic flaw. “My main message is a push for people to look at things from a different perspective,” she asserts, emphasizing that nothing is inherently worthless; rather, its value is often replaced by mere utility. Her perspective aligns with wider critiques of capitalism, as her work exposes the logic by which value is assigned or denied to both objects and people.

While she does not label herself an activist, Feruh’s lifestyle, marked by a deliberate refusal to waste materials, reflects her desire for a world where nothing and no one is so easily discarded. Candid about the impossibility of fully escaping consumer culture, she notes that even flea market shopping is a form of consumerism, though it offers the thrill of discovering something unique amid uniformity. This paradox, that one can critique capitalism while remaining part of it, underscores the challenges of true rebellion. Feruh sees the problem from within, recognizing that authentic resistance rarely occurs in isolation. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, we have become “slaves who exploit ourselves and believe we are free.” In an achievement-oriented society, external domination has been replaced by internalized demands to perform, to produce, and to consume, demands we accept willingly. Her work pushes back against this invisible pressure, creating space for a form of value that cannot be measured by productivity or market worth.

Feruh also speaks to the power of memory and nostalgia in a generation shaped by both digital overload and a longing for analog textures. She remarks, “Each generation has its own nostalgia, a kind of secret language shared by a wider group of people. The materials I use are directly connected to the nostalgia of the generation I belong to.”Nostalgia becomes a tool to disrupt, not just recall, by giving old images new context. In reassembling these fragments, she does not aim to recover a lost world but to reconstruct new meaning from its remains.

Untitled,(2021) Analogue Collage by Minja Feruh

Feruh refuses to sanitize her final pieces. She embraces jagged edges, visible tape, and awkward overlaps, which serve as the raw markers of a hand-made collage, standing in stark contrast to the polished aesthetics that dominate social media, where perfection often equals visibility and approval. “I’m a perfectionist,” she says, “but I get incredible satisfaction from turning chaos into order. Maybe that’s the deeper reason behind my obsession with collage. I find personal harmony in making sense of random scraps.” She has a gift for seeing the beauty in the overlooked. In her studio, discarded materials become powerful tools for reflection and creative rebirth. She considers her work a reinterpretation of past forms, not a groundbreaking invention, reflecting the idea that artistic innovation often lies in repurposing existing elements.In this way, collage becomes a metaphor for how her generation navigates cultural detritus and existential dread: by piecing together hope from fragments and rejecting the myth that only new objects or experiences can solve deeper structural problems.

In her finished collages, Feruh creates a deliberate tension between the personal and the universal. She combines human elements, swirling cosmic imagery, and fragments of mass-produced text to critique how our culture fragments identity and treats complexity as disposable. For example, when she places a solitary eye next to the rings of Saturn, she invites us to consider which seems more alien: the endless expanse of space or the ubiquitous piles of waste on our planet. Rather than using images solely for their visual appeal, Feruh reconfigures everyday objects, such as clothing labels and discarded packaging, to challenge a culture that devalues both our material world and our collective memory. In doing so, she urges us to rethink what we consider beautiful and essential.

Feruh remains unpretentious about the role of the viewer. Rather than dictating meaning, she believes art should be a participatory experience, a social space where interpretations are as varied as the fragments themselves. She resists a didactic approach and sees the viewer’s role as actively engaging with what initially appears to be random snippets. That willingness to look closer—to discover potential where there was once only “junk”—mirrors her own creative gesture.

Ultimately, the heart of her contribution lies in challenging the logic of disposability. Her work suggests that true originality does not come from creating something entirely new but from salvaging what others have dismissed and discovering fresh connections within it. If the capitalist machine convinces us that only shiny, untouched commodities deserve our attention, Feruh’s art compels us to reconsider the value of the forgotten and discarded. In doing so, she offers a glimpse into how an entire generation might begin to reimagine the world around them, one found object at a time.

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Minja Feruh (b. 1997, Belgrade, Serbia) is a visual artist whose work merges collage, photography, and graphic design. After completing her primary music education in violin and viola at the “Vladimir Đorđević” Music School, she shifted her focus to visual arts by studying clothing design at the High School for Textile Design and later majoring in photography at the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade. During her studies, she honed her photographic and graphic skills while developing a strong affinity for collage, which now forms the core of her creative practice. Her graphic work has been featured in three book designs. Feruh currently lives and works in Belgrade.