Intervju Mila Panić is an artist and stand-up comedian from Bosnia, who lives in Berlin, and has a solo exhibition Hurts So Good at GMK Zagreb, in September 2024. She describes herself as a person full of opinions, frustrations, and occasional anger, for whom visual art became too slow of a medium so she found the needed outlet in the fast and furious dynamic of the stand-up comedy, which she now performs daily utilising her broken-English charm on the Berlin audience.
Mila and I met, briefly, back in 2019 while I was visiting Berlin. We set for a coffee but I was more awakened by Mila’s vibrant energy and brisk intellect, than a dose of caffeine. With that same excitement, I’ve been following her practice ever since and was intrigued by her (seemingly) unexpected foray into stand-up comedy. An opportunity to meet again, coinciding with her Zagreb exhibition at the GMK, was a wonderful occasion to delve deep into the core of her artistic interests which, very logically, connect the two professions.
Ira: Mila, you and I met back in 2019, before Covid, before the stand-up…
Seems like a lifetime ago. A lot changed in these five years in terms of my practice and how I see myself as an artist. In 2019, I was still defining my artistic interests, exploring different things. Nowadays I have a better clue what I want to do, even though I can never claim I’m fully formed.
Is this clarity connected to the discovery of stand-up? Does it involve greater incorporation of humour in your artwork?
Yes, definitely, stand-up is a big addition to the development of myself, not just as an artist but as a person. I do think that even before I discovered stand-up, there was something cooking in me. My works had satirical or ironic points of view, provoking something uncomfortable which is a fertile ground for a joke. But my artistic practice was very slow, and given I’m an extrovert and a very active and social person, it didn’t make sense to me to have a practice that has such a different pace to my personality. When I discovered stand-up, which is now an everyday activity that I do, it was like a piece of me that was missing, an outlet that I needed. At the same time, I was very much saturated with my art practice, or with the art world and its protocols. I didn’t feel my art in my guts like I did ten years before; I was not as excited about it. And then coming into stand-up, it really opened a new meaning of art or how art or an opinion can be produced in a different way.
During those early days of stand-up, did you see it as something that would be incorporated into your art practice, or something that would come alongside it, or even replace it?
When I started doing stand-up, it was just a couple of open-mics here and there and I was not brave enough to claim, I’m gonna do this for the rest of my life. I saw it more as something that could refresh my artistic practice. Like, I could use it as a research method. I have an idea and in order to see if it oscillates with bigger groups, I do a couple of jokes about it and if people laugh, there is something there and I can put another artwork or exhibition together. But with stand-up, it’s very hard not to get addicted. It’s not just from the physical point of view where you get addicted to dopamine; I got addicted to how to write a joke. And of course, when people start laughing with your opinion, it’s very much validating – means I’m not crazy to think that way. Also, I was putting a lot of work into it. I’d go do stand-up every night and it started taking a lot of my physical and mental space. So I realised this is not just a sidekick and a research method for my art practice, it’s becoming something more serious. It filled up a gap that was missing for me and my personality. I was always full of opinions, full of shit, and I just needed something to frame it properly, where there is no mediator between me and the audience, no artwork, no curator. I’m directly with the audience and I tell you what I think, and I can see what you think based on your reaction, which you cannot fake.
So now that you put it in an exhibition and present extracts from your comedy gigs (which were not filmed originally to be shown in that context), you’re again losing that directness with the audience, our immediate reactions. How did you approach placing it in this context?
This is the first time I’ve put the jokes in the gallery. There are a couple of reasons why I decided to do it now. I did several stand-up performances within the museum or in a gallery, which was definitely much more challenging than doing it in a comedy club because the audience is quite monotone, mostly artists and cultural workers. As much as they think they’re open minded, they’re very narrow minded in their own liberal intellectual spaces. Also, in these gallery contexts, I would feel like I need to mix the performance with something, follow it with a discussion where I do a couple of jokes and then we discuss. This was a good experience in terms of, let me try introduce this (i.e. stand-up) to arts people. Of course, people know what stand-up is but they don’t necessarily go to live comedy or understand how it works. And so at GMK, I’ve put different types of open mics on TVs, to show many different ways of doing a joke. How one night it does well and tomorrow it does not. I’m basically showing my studio work, not the finished jokes. And my studio for comedy is a comedy club. In order for something to be funny, someone needs to laugh and I cannot do this by writing it in my house. I don’t know if it’s a joke until I test it with a live audience. So what I’m showing at GMK is a work in progress. Some jokes are half done, some are not good, some are. It’s just to show variety, so people get an insight into how it’s made. I’m not expecting an active laughter. Of course, if you laugh, great, but I know there is a difference between being in a comedy club and being alone with your headphones. Laughing is something very social, and it’s also sometimes a very shameful thing. So that’s why it’s best to have it at night, because night is always for some kind of shameful activities.
You spoke about a different sensation of time between visual art and stand-up, how visual art felt too slow for your personality. But I’m getting a sense that writing a successful joke also takes time…
Yes, but you are not sitting around waiting for inspiration. Every day you’re doing something for it, putting yourself in front of the audience. But yes, when it comes to making a good joke, it takes months. There is this one joke that took me two months to complete. I was performing it for weeks but felt in my gut that it’s not giving justice to the certain community I wanted to highlight. But I didn’t have any other way of making it right, unless I continue performing it and observe the reactions; what works and what does not, what gets the laughs and what shocks, which groups are shocked and why that may be. So yeah, it took a couple of months to come to the end of the joke but every night (while still working on it) you are performing it, which gives you that sense of adrenaline.
Are you trying to say that a reaction of shock makes something a bad joke? Could it be that someone just lacks a sense of humour? And also, it seems to me that shock could be quite a valuable reaction…
It can be very valuable, but I think comedians who just want to shock… Look, we can shock everyone with certain statements that are the opposite of what majority thinks. So it’s easy to shock, but much harder to justify that point of view, defend it. It’s like, you dig a hole and try to get out of this hole. That’s what I do for many jokes. Of course, some people are shocked because you’re touching on the topics they think you should not joke about. They’re like, oh, should I laugh at this? And then once you make them laugh, it’s almost like you tricked them into laughing. So yeah, to paraphrase another comedian: It’s not enough just to cross a border with a joke, you need to bring the audience with you across that border.
Before we talk about the other few works that you have in the exhibition, which were part of your art practice before the stand-up, I wanted to ask about your aesthetic choice to present these stand-up sketches on old TVs rather than fancy plasma screens stuck to the wall.
Well, first of all, these TVs are borderline garbage. People get rid of them almost for free, so they are accessible. If we needed to rent big plasma TVs, they would need to be connected to the walls which means I’d lose the wall for anything else. Also, these TVs create a sculptural formation in the space. I was mostly leaning on the aesthetics of Nam June Paik, having these screens almost presenting a body, a physical presence in the space, which felt fitting because stand-up comedy has the performers. I also didn’t want it to be like a Netflix thing, or have the aesthetics of phones. I grew up with this kind of TVs. It’s almost like an Instagram reel on the old TV.
Yeah, it makes it archaic in a way, which encourages us to see the stand-up differently… So, around them are a few of your self-portraits layered with drawings or texts containing short catchphrases or slogans. What can you tell us about them?
These sentences are from the things I collect or hear and take a note of, and then make into something like a slogan. There’s not a lot of them in this exhibition, because I didn’t want to saturate the space. There’s a lot of Milas in the space as it is. Eight TVs with Mila on them. Plus, a large-scale wallpaper: “If I stop smiling, they will see how angry I am” which I presented before (not in Zagreb) but wanted to show again as it correlates with the content of the stand-up jokes, in terms of me trying to rationalize the world around me, make sense of it by making a joke out of it.
I like what you’ve mentioned just then – a lot of Milas – because it speaks to your ongoing interest in identity and how it can be discombobulated through different contexts we find ourselves in, and especially the experience of migration which you and other members of your close family and community have an experience of. The sense of being fractured and trying to reassemble oneself in a cohesive identity that would fit the new context. So this aesthetic of a lot of you in the space, seems beautifully fitting.
The experience of migration is the one where you constantly need to moderate yourself. Voice yourself down. Be careful how you behave in certain situations so not to come across as wild or big mouth or rude or too direct or whatever. So yes, I have channelled this into these self-portraits which are mostly not the happy versions of me; they are the versions of myself that would not be seen as pleasant in a public space. And then they have these interventions on them, in the form of drawings or text, which are almost like a diary. Some of them are very personal or intimate, but you’re also invited to interpret them in your own way. I try to make them slightly disturbing, too.
Which is where that reaction of shock plays in again. These works have that element of discomfort, or disturbance as you said.
Of course. Because if I need to moderate myself even in an artwork, where am I then. If I can’t dare to be free enough here. Some of them are more, some of them are less provoking. But as a series when you put them together and it’s hundreds of them, it gives you this anxious feeling.
The texts that are layered over these self-portraits look like graffiti. They are handwritten by you, I assume, sprayed over the image. And because it looks like graffiti, there’s this sense of vandalism, whether it’s you vandalizing your own image or someone else is destroying your image with this thought or drawing. What’s more, these interventions are made in black or red, and when it’s red and the tint leaks slightly, there’s a sense of blood dripping.
Yes, when I was doing it, I really felt like I’m vandalizing my own work. When you’re spraying on a large scale, there is no way back if you make a mistake. And I like this possibility of a risk, that you can actually ruin your own work. A risk that you might “bomb”, which is the same in stand-up. There’s also another work in the exhibition, with the boxing gloves that already has the red paint on the gloves and on my portrait, and it almost feels like someone else did it to me. So yeah, there is this sense of self-inflicting… not pain, but being uncomfortable or something.
Exposing yourself to us by making these social commentaries. And it’s these social conditions, which you are reacting to, that are punching you… In fact, many of your comedy and your art inspiration in general, comes from the experience of discomfort and frustration. Which is perhaps summed up in the exhibition title: Hurts so Good?
Yes, frustration is generative. I think even starting the stand-up came from it. It was at the time when the war in Ukraine started and it was all over the news, and I had no clue how much it provoked me. The whole narrative that it’s the first conflict on European soil since the Second World War. It really triggered so much anger in me. It was like they finally publicly admitted that they didn’t give a shit about what happened in Bosnia. I hated this ignorance or selective empathy that happened, and that opened something in me. To make sense of it, I needed to write it down. I need to tell you. And the only way I could tell you was on stage, through a joke, through stand-up. Hey, I want you to see my point of view. And I want you to understand that I’m not the only one. I’m not crazy to think like that. I hope you understand as well. Making a joke about it and people reacting, made me feel a bit at ease.
Like a release.
Exactly. It was really like a release, but a lot of that came from being frustrated. Even today, the best jokes come from being frustrated, or being annoyed. I think that’s something that’s always very fruitful. I mean, there are some comedians that are always angry on stage. I don’t think that’s healthy, either. There is this fear, if I’m not angry anymore, will I be creative, will I make good jokes? It’s not healthy to be frustrated and angry just so you could be creative. But it’s a very fruitful point of view, being annoyed or living in the cracks of society. I’m an immigrant here in Germany, I don’t speak the proper language, but I fit in some crack that gives me a specific perspective.
Now that you mention that, another interest of yours is language, the fact that you operate outside of your mother tongue, “a second hand English” as you said in one sketch. Can you say a bit about that?
Well, I don’t do stand-up in my mother tongue (Bosnian) but in a so-called “broken English”. Sometimes I feel this limitation as very liberating because it makes you sharper, you say things without bullshitting. Not that I’m saying you need to dumb down your language. If anything, you need to bring it up.
But it makes you more direct.
Yeah, it makes you more direct. Some comedians tell me they don’t like it because it makes it harder to write, but I like the sharpness that comes out of it. Could even be charming. For instance, I almost never use “the” or “a” and somehow the audience is fine with it. And it kind of helps me make a rhythm. Maybe I’m not going to get Netflix special because of the grammar, but I’m not sure if I care about it. On the other hand, this is the only communication tool that I have, language, so maybe at some point I should get a bit better in terms of …
…Although in the text about your Broken English podcast, you mention the importance of resistance to proper English, not over-correcting your second language and making it so neat that it becomes fake and you become invisible. In your words, we should consider “the ’pollution’ of English as an act of protest.”
Broken English podcast came before stand-up. I was so sick of the art applications I was putting together, where you need to wash your language so that by the end of it you don’t even know if it’s you and your ideas anymore. Of course, when I came to Germany, I tried to speak better English, with no accent, but at some point I was like: For whose ears? And why do I care more about your ears than my own tongue? In my comedy sketches, I sometimes struggle to pronounce certain words, but somehow the joke still seems to work. The audience gets it despite, because there is a certain melody to it. And so they tolerate this kind of thing.
I feel like with language it’s about confidence. If you pronounce something confidently, even if it’s mispronounced, the meaning comes across. Because we do understand each other beyond language anyway.
Exactly. There are so many other things that are not just simply words.
That reminds me of something that your GMK curators (Antonela Solenički & Petar Vranjković) wrote in the exhibition essay, and it has to do with “corpoliteracy”, which I understand as something like the body-language or gestures that convey meaning and complement or clash with the language used. This brings us back to the juxtaposition of your image and the text graffitied over it, how maybe on the image you have an expression that conveys one thing but then the text that is layered over it (which represents your internal thought) exposes something else. So the two clash, creating confusion in terms of what we can rely on.
Or sometimes they complement each other. Almost like a meme. And because of my image being austere, you get the seriousness of a joke, which I like. A lot of people are scared of jokes. A lot of people find jokes vulgar and think it’s entertainment for the peasants. In museums and galleries, we’re meant to be whispering, laughter is inappropriate. We need to quiet down and be demure; jokes seem as something that is not highly intellectual. So having the presence of active laughter in these kinds of spaces, or allowing that kind of language in these spaces, is an intervention. In reality, these spaces are very much constrained. I don’t think that an art space nowadays is very free, in terms of being able to say what you want to say. I was thinking, why are people so scared of a joke? It’s because it feels like I’m tricking them into laughing: Oh my God, I laughed at this which means everyone is going to think that I’m complicit with your opinion. This fear is created by the woke and politically correct culture, cancel culture. All these concepts are great concepts, but when overused, they borderline with ignorance. People become so scared to voice their opinions or thoughts. But we can have opinions and thoughts; you don’t necessarily act on them.
I think there’s a belief that if we don’t say things, we stop thinking them. If we don’t express what we actually feel, that’s somehow going to erase the feeling itself. But perhaps the only way to transform an opinion is by voicing it and having a healthy dialogue.
If something is on our mind socially and politically, why not speak about it on stage. We shouldn’t be afraid of it. And look, I can say whatever I want at this point because I’m not famous. I’m not on television. I don’t have a large following on Instagram. I don’t have a big influence on people’s opinions. And for me, every joke is still a small art piece for myself, and I treasure it as that.
I feel like you could get bigger. But, that might come at the expense of needing to censor yourself. Would you consider making that compromise?
There is always a way to say what you want to say. You just need to become better at writing. At this stage I don’t know if I want to become big; I’m still trying to figure out how my visual art practice mixes with stand-up, and if it is possible to merge them. I think it is, because I’m one person. But it’s going to take at least five, six years for me to crystallize how this together is together. But yeah, would I censor myself, I don’t know. Now it’s hard to imagine this. I don’t know what kind of money is going to be in the game. Maybe tomorrow I sell my soul. I really don’t know. If you asked me five years ago when we met in 2019, what are you going to be in 2024, it would have been a wild idea if someone told me, you’re going to do stand-up 10 to 15 times a week. It’s wild turns in life. So, I don’t know what’s going to happen in five years, but I’m trying to be patient in terms of how I’m going to grow as an artist and comedian. The best thing for me would be to have both of these worlds. Stand-up is currently an obsession, but I still have a fetish for objects or doing something with my hands, and I like being part of the visual art world too. And I think that my practice in visual art contributes to my approach to writing jokes. I took the discipline of making an artwork into writing a joke. When you’re making a concept for an artwork, you need to make it bulletproof from every part, because you will be asked how you see this work in different contexts. It’s the same with a joke, you need to make it logical so it works across many levels and classes and societies.
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