Visible Forces
- Savina Ražnatović
- Jun 3
- 5 min read
On Movement, Instability and Perception in the Work of Fatmir Beržanin
Fatmir Beržanin’s practice is shaped by a persistent attention to what usually passes unnoticed: air moving around a body, water losing stability, wind pressing against matter, motion leaving a trace. His works do not present these elements as scientific illustrations, nor do they use scientific language as decoration. Instead, Beržanin approaches physics as something lived. Natural laws, in his work, are felt through balance, risk, pressure, hesitation, resistance and the possibility of losing control.
The scientific and the poetic are not separate registers in Beržanin’s work. The mechanisms of nature already carry a certain elegance, almost an unavoidable beauty. A physical phenomenon is never only a phenomenon: it is also an experience, a memory, a sensation, a way of perceiving one’s own vulnerability within the world. Terms such as turbulence, interference, cycloid or wind shadow do not function only as titles. They open the works toward a field where perception, knowledge and bodily experience overlap.
Visually, Beržanin’s works are built through surfaces that seem to move, absorb pressure or register the passage of force. Lines, spirals, arrows, stains and vertical traces guide the eye across the image, suggesting currents of air, water or energy. The painted space often feels unstable: forms appear to bend, drift, sink or be pulled in a certain direction. At the same time, the works keep a sense of playfulness through simple objects, soft colors and almost childlike motifs. This contrast gives the works their particular tension. The images appear approachable at first, but their surfaces gradually reveal movement, pressure and a sense that something invisible is acting on the visible world.
In Biciklista u turbulenciji zavetrine kamiona (Cyclist in the Turbulence of a Truck’s Slipstream), the image begins from an everyday situation: a cyclist moving behind a truck. Yet the real subject of the work is not simply the cyclist, the truck, or the road, but the invisible disturbance of air between them. The painting makes visible a force that is usually felt only through its consequences. The body is placed inside a field of instability. It moves, but it is also moved. It acts, but it is also exposed. This tension between agency and vulnerability appears throughout Beržanin’s practice.
A related logic is present in Vetar u leđa (Wind at One’s Back), where the title carries both a physical and an emotional meaning. Wind pushes the body forward, while the expression also suggests support, relief, acceleration, or the sudden feeling that movement has become possible. Beržanin’s work often remains in this double register: between the literal and the allegorical, between measurable force and subjective experience. The strength of the work lies precisely in this simultaneity, where neither meaning cancels the other.
Instability is one of the central conditions of these works. Movement is rarely presented as something fully controlled. A paper boat is exposed to water and air. A cyclist is caught in turbulent force. Stairs become sponge-like under the pressure of an anxious body. Waves interfere with one another. Forms move, bend, resist or lose certainty. The world in Beržanin’s work is not fixed matter, but a field of relations and pressures. Even stillness becomes questionable. As the artist suggests, absolute rest may be impossible: even when the body tries to remain in place, the ground itself is already moving.
This attention to movement also explains the importance of trace. Beržanin is interested in motion, but also in what motion leaves behind. A trace allows time to become visible. It connects isolated points into a line, turning a sequence of moments into something that can be perceived at once. In this sense, his images do not simply represent events. They slow them down. They hold open the moment in which a force becomes visible, or almost visible.
One of the key statements in the interview is Beržanin’s idea that making the invisible visible is a shared aim of both art and science. This offers a way of understanding his practice without reducing it to explanation. Even when the titles carry an educational dimension, the works do not become didactic. Instead, they create conditions for attention. They invite the viewer to notice what is usually sensed only indirectly: air moving around an object, water carrying a fragile construction, the body negotiating risk, the mind translating physical experience into image.
The paper boat is especially telling in this context. In Brod od papira (Paper Boat) and Brod od papira II (Paper Boat II), the object first appears as something simple, fragile and childlike, an object of play. But once placed in relation to water, wind and movement, it becomes a small construction exposed to forces larger than itself. It does not need to become a heavy metaphor in order to matter. Its fragility is already enough. The ordinary object becomes meaningful precisely because it is placed in a situation of exposure.
There is also a subtle sense of the absurd in these works. Stairs behave like sponge. A cyclist enters the invisible turbulence of a truck. A paper boat tries to exist within unstable conditions. This absurdity is not theatrical or exaggerated. It comes from a shift in how the everyday is perceived. Beržanin does not invent impossible worlds; he reveals the strangeness already present in the real one. His images show reality as unstable, shaped by invisible forces, delayed consequences, and shifting relations between bodies, objects and their surroundings.
These works are connected by a recurring way of perceiving the world. Beržanin’s attention moves widely: from natural phenomena to remembered situations, from scientific concepts to bodily sensations, from humor to anxiety. Still, a thread appears in this movement: an interest in how the world acts upon the body, and how the body tries to understand, resist, or move with those forces.
His practice is compelling because it refuses to treat knowledge as pure explanation. Instead, it returns knowledge to sensation: to the body that hesitates, balances, misreads, adjusts and survives through attention. The works ask the viewer to become more attentive, both to the image and to the world beyond the gallery. In this sense, Beržanin’s work does not end with the image. It extends into perception itself, training the eye, the body and the mind to recognize force not as an abstract concept, but as something that shapes the visible world before it can be fully seen.
Fatimir Beržanin (b. 1995, Novi Pazar, Serbia) is a visual artist based between Novi Pazar and Belgrade. He completed his undergraduate studies in fine arts in Novi Pazar and his master’s studies in Belgrade. His practice has been presented through one solo exhibition, as well as numerous group exhibitions, art colonies, and residencies, including Sedmi Likovni Susreti at KC Kuća Kralja Petra I in Belgrade, the Autumn Art Salon at MMC Gallery in Novi Pazar, the Deliblatski Pesak 2025 art colony in Deliblatska Peščara near Pančevo, the First Mitrovica Art Residency in 2023, and the Hrid 2021 art colony in Plav.
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