Ante Bozanich

Biography

Working in relative obscurity and on an intimate scale, Ante Bozanich has produced a powerful body of psychodramatic work exploring the exile of the self in contemporary culture. Born in Yugoslavia, he emigrated to the United States in 1967 and began working in video in 1974, while living in Los Angeles.

Bozanich's work reflects the influence of performance and body art on the Southern California video art of that time. His early works feature visceral confrontations with the camera; the artist uses the instantaneous and intimate nature of video production as a psychodramatic construct. What distinguishes this work from many similar treatments is the psychic power of Bozanich's presence and the depth of his reach into himself.

Advancing the deeply personal and sometimes primal character of this work, his later tapes continue to illuminate his interior haunts with courageous acuity. Writing in Video 80, artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto state that Bozanich's "personal existential vision... foreshadowed the nihilism of punk and neo-expressionism," and that his works "embody Antonin Artaud's obsession with art that is at once 'violent, insulting, dangerous and self-destructive.'"

Bozanich was born in 1949 in Vis, Yugoslavia. He received a B.A., an M.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ford Foundation. Bozanich's tapes have been exhibited internationally, at festivals and institutions including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Hare Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Artspace, San Francisco; San Francisco International Video Festival; Image Forum, Tokyo; and the American Film Institute's National Video Festival, Los Angeles. Bozanich lives in New York.