Biography
Mila Panić (b. 1991) is a Bosnian-born artist and stand-up comedian. Her artist's practice lies at the intersection of visual art and stand-up comedy. Fields that rarely speak with each other meet in my practice, showing that criticality can remain playful and accessible. From drawing to stand-up comedy, Mila became known for her dark humour and ironic twist, capturing audiences with her sharp wit and fearless commentary. In joking against the normalisation of fear and violence, Panić moves to liberate language from the individual despair that one cannot change the world. That change takes place every time she jokes, and every time the audience laughs in return.
She is the co-founder of the collective and association Fully Funded Residencies.eV., which provides an overview of paid opportunities for all cultural workers.
Her most recent exhibitions were: 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Art Encounters Biennale in Romania, GMK (Zagreb), eastcontemporary Gallery (Milan), Kuenstlerhaus Sootburn (Hamburg), POST (Arnhem), Autostrada Bienalle (Prizren) etc. Panic is the winner of ZVONO YVVA of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and recipient of a number of scholarships such as the NEUSTART Stiftung Kunstfond Bonn grant for 2023, Braunschweig Projects artist grant 2022/23, , Künstlerhaus Lukas, Ahrenshoop, Residency Unlimited, New York (US), etc. She is based in Berlin, Germany.
Archive records · BUNA vol. 4 / 2026
Premise (I part of the joke): While other kids played with Legos, 2024,
glass neon, 150 x 30cm
Artists
Panić moves between art and comedy contexts where she often performs an exaggerated version of the Balkan “other,” mobilising stereotypes of violence, backwardness and post-war identity only to turn them back on the listener. References to her childhood during the war in Bosnia appear through the structure of the joke rather than through testimony: family memory, mass graves and the unresolved disappearance of the dead are brought into proximity with the mechanics of set-up and punchline.
It implicates the audience in the distance between an event and its retelling, while exposing how quickly historical violence can become narrative, image or cultural shorthand. For those with a more immediate relationship to the region and its recent history, humour and grief remain present at the same time. Panić works precisely within that unstable overlap, using comedy not to soften the violence of the subject, but to complicate the position from which it is spoken about, heard and consumed.