Ena Kantardžić is an American artist who arrived in the United States in 1997 as a refugee from Bosnia and Herzegovina. They grew up in Boston, MA, where they earned their BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2021. In 2024, they received their MFA in 4D Design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Kantardžić is currently the Artist/Educator-In-Residence at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA, where they will remain until 2026. Before pursuing formal art education, they worked as an audio/visual technician in queer nightlife scenes.
I work in metaphor, combining language, design, performance, and pre-existing objects to create experiential installations. I am thinking about the ethics of creation: its sustainability or lack-there-of. Mimicking a circular economy within my practice, I reuse objects and transfigure them. They become symbols. These symbols are rooted in stage technologies and mythology.
The symbols desire to reframe time through a method I call “non-duration.” Non-duration posits that power dictates a thing’s lifespan. It is a queering of chronology. In my metaphors, common sources of power are electricity and coding, the sky, heat, and the body.
The non-durational configurations of symbols come alive through new materials (bioplastics), being my own means of production, and the hacking of existing technologies. Experiential installations can include kinetic objects, scents, sounds, or handcrafted light. For instance, daffodils (narcissi) are grown, harvested, and synthesized into filters for spotlights to shine through. This suspends the flowers’ duration, altering their natural passage through time while critically recontextualizing the origin story of the flower. Through these materials and experiences, I subvert authorship, allowing the work to exist as an ongoing, self-sustaining system of meaning.
last updated: 10/07/2025
website under slight construction
