Ana Prvački
∗1976, Yugoslavia/Romania
Ana Prvački (1976, Pančevo, former Yugoslavia) is a Serbian–Romanian artist living in Berlin. Her practice is highly diverse, ranging from film to performance, from painting to installation, and from mixed reality to sculpture. Prvački’s works emerge from a deep reflection on natural mechanisms and on how nature evokes pleasure, wonder, and liberation.For many years, the artist has worked with the subject of bees, exploring the behavior of these insects and our dependence on their work of pollination.
“Did you know that a bee has as many hairs as a squirrel? My interest in bees is a family affair: when my great-great-great-grandmother married my great-great-great-grandfather, she brought bees as part of her dowry. I come from generations of beekeepers, and bees have always fascinated me — for their history, their methodology, their sensitivity to the environment, and their poetry.”
Facing the central plaza of St. Cristina, Ana Prvački presents Emergency Queen over Dolomites, her first large-scale painting ever displayed in public, installed in the window of the local library. Oriented toward the surrounding mountain landscape, the work stages a charged, allegorical scene that evokes states of ecological imbalance and urgency.
On the plaza, four marble sculptures replicate beehives at a 1:1 scale. These Bee Memorials, modelled after the Langstroth hive, appear as silent monuments to the honeybee (Apis mellifera), a species increasingly threatened with extinction. Positioned near the village cemetery, they introduce a subtle tension between commemoration and irony.
Together, painting and sculpture form a dispersed installation across interior and exterior space. While the painting suggests a narrative of crisis, the hives translate this condition into material form—rendering the invisible labour and fragility of ecological systems into objects of quiet, reflective presence.
