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The

Artist

Nominated in
2025
By
Organ Vida
Lives and Works in
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Igor Shiller (1996) is a Serbia-born, Amsterdam-based visual artist who graduated with a degree in photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2021. The following year, he was nominated for the FOAM Paul Huf Award. His work has been showcased at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Unfair Amsterdam and the EYE Film Museum, among others. In 2024, he received the Mangelos Award, honoring him as Serbia’s best young visual artist.

Schiller’s artistic practice explores the lasting imprint of childhood, drawing inspiration from memories and his Balkan roots. Through photography, film, and set design, he transforms family archive into uncanny dreamscapes saturated with tenderness and warmth. Embracing play as both method and subject, he turns toys, lullabies, and games into historical artifacts that reveal how tradition and upbringing shape and perpetuate rigid systems. As colors grow richer and characters take form, the line between remembering and reinventing begins to blur. What started as a search for fragments of memory became an unfolding tale of identity and belonging.
Projects
2023

Familiar Characters

Familiar Characters is a photographic series depicting the journey of an adult revisiting childhood, created in Serbia over 3 years. Despite growing up in the aftermath of war, my family’s efforts to preserve the normality and happiness of my childhood allowed me to develop a deep connection and fascination with that time in my life. In that process of returning to my early years, I became a little kid again, playing with toys and creating imaginary kingdoms. Soon enough, memories acquired a strange appeal as I began to piece together a wider picture of events from my early years. I returned to my hometown, finding myself in the old family house and the landscapes surrounding it. In an attempt to preserve a naive memory of childhood, I began painting it over with vivid colors and filling it with playful characters. The uncanny feeling grew stronger as this adventure of an adult revisiting childhood took a strange turn, making me both its host and visitor. The boundaries between past and present, or memory and fact, blurred and became insignificant. My world became one big playground, a field for building new memories and fantasies. As I reimagined my past, these fragmented recollections took on a more universal meaning, becoming a lens through which I explored deeper themes of identity and belonging. Familiar Characters evolved into a personal mythology, not only an exploration of my childhood but also a broader reflection on human nature and our need to preserve our sacred (inner) places.
Igor
was nominated by
Organ Vida
in
2025
Show all projects
Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.

Five nominated artists navigate personal and collective histories through photography, sculpture, installation and moving image. Across their works, the past become a space of active construction — where childhood, lineage, relationships, and technology collide in a process of re-imagination. In 'Familiar characters' Igor Schiller revisits his childhood memories, both as a host and a visitor, balancing nostalgia with the uncanny. As he reimagines the past, his playful photographic series triggers deeper explorations of identity and belonging. Similarly, Marija Mandić in 'White Bee' excavates lost histories, tracing a matrilineal presence that has been systematically erased. With her project she delves into themes of memory, female identity, and family connections, shaped through lingering intergenerational bonds. The intimate structures of relationships are further questioned in 'TWO', a project by Sara Perović which dismantles conventional notions of love, partnership, and permanence. Through a personal photographic archive, the artist redefines "two" as a shifting, fluid equation. Fluidity and notion of transformation extend into material itself in Sara Rman's body of work titled 'In process'. By intervening in photographic surfaces with fire, light, and decay, the artist exposes the unseen textures of image-making, embracing imperfection and change. Finally, in 'Terminal Tears / The Feminine Urge to…' by Laureta Hajrullahu, identity is not only remembered but actively reconstructed through interaction with technological devices. Screenshots, digital artifacts, and cast objects become tools for dismantling archetypes, questioning how the internet and media shape our perception of selfhood.

Organ Vida's 2025 nominations were curated by:

Organ Vida (curatorial collective)

Barbara Gregov

Lovro Japundžić

Lea Vene

Tena Starčević, curator

Vanja Žunić, curator

Hana Čeferin, curator and publisher