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Alena Mehić (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is a recipient of the 2021 Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.

Alena Mehić explores the politics of memory, the archive, built environments, and national trauma in relation to the region and people of the former Yugoslavia. Utilizing national imagery and historical design strategies, her work explores the dissonance between various national attitudes, as well as personal feelings of displacement.

Mehić employs interdisciplinary methods in order to study places of transition and the collapse of a nation, examining utopian intentions within Yugoslav architecture and interior design, and documenting lived experiences through photos, objects, and videos, and the spread of propagandized media. Many of her works, such as Or Pigs and Pearls and Plavi Voz, exhibit dated interior spaces and socialist modern furnishings that inherently indicate specific places and times; these spaces in turn become monuments — retrieving memories, scattered by conflict and instability, in order to recreate them in tender yet analytical imagery.