Veštica, also known as Mariah, is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, digital and generative media. Her practice centres on violence as it appears across social structures, from the family to the state, using vibrant, childlike imagery and dark humour to expose the unsettling reality beneath.
Veštica holds a Master of Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and a Master of Science from the Politecnico di Milano, and has worked as an independent artist since 2022. Her work is indirectly inspired by the history of the Balkans, a region of recurring conflict that she draws on to explore war as a machine of destruction and the cultural trauma it produces, alongside the broader, everyday violence embedded in social systems. She lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia, after a period based in Milan, Italy, between 2019 and 2021.
Between 2021 and 2023 she developed Rythmicaliness, translating data collected during product-testing sessions for a smart vibrator device into audiovisual and musical works, and exhibited it as a solo show at The House of Youth in Belgrade in 2023.In Before therapy sessions (2023) she drew directly from her own psychotherapy exercises, producing works that touch on growing up amid wartime and post-war events and the position of women in the Balkans.Daily grind (2025) satirises hustle culture through repetitive animated loops, grown out of a six-month performance in which she produced work daily to match what an algorithm rewarded.
In 2022 she collaborated with the poet Legna Rodríguez Iglesias on Fácil, a bilingual visual poem created for theVERSEverse's collection Poesía de Protesta, shown at the Refraction Festival in Miami that year.Her work has since entered the collection of Mad Arts in Dania Beach, Florida, and been shown on the main stage of the NFC Summit in Lisbon and on Times Square's TSX Broadway display, both in 2024.
