Nina
Babic

1
I think that was actually the greatest benefit in my life: that I never had a plan. My goal was to become something that would make me happy and fulfilled, but I simply hadn’t figured out the way I would achieve it.
2
I paint women, and the question always arises why I paint women and whether I am a feminist. But I paint women simply because I am a woman, and I deal with women’s issues because I am a woman. I don’t know any other way. Being a woman, for me, is my natural state. But I understand — no matter how difficult it may be or how much of a cliché it sometimes sounds — I understand how very difficult it is to be a woman in the region where I live.
3
In my life, I have certainly made 50 percent good and 50 percent bad decisions. But there is one thing I am most proud of: that I made decisions. I think that is it. Women here are not given the right to decide, somehow through the patterns we have inherited. It may not be visible, but through the patterns we inherited, we are not allowed to decide. And that is our problem. That is actually the problem of every woman. And then a woman accepts to live within those patterns. Not because someone directly tells her so, but simply because those are the inherited patterns that a woman must not decide, because what will happen? It is not up to her to decide.
4
Because I cannot do anything else, and because through my art, I can show people and observers what the life of a woman is really like.
5
However, since we live in the society we live in, it is very difficult for women to say it out loud, because they fear judgment, they fear shame, they fear that their decision is not good because we are not supposed to decide — we have the role that someone gave us and we are supposed to play that role. But we don’t want to be actors and play roles, and that is where the internal conflict arises in every woman and ultimately in every human being.
6
I think that is the solidarity among women: when you realise that you are not alone in those processes that you feel, which society has imposed on you, so that you feel shame.
7
That is why here, too, I think women felt courage when they read that, when they saw that someone else feels the same and that they are not alone. No matter how much the word and the sentence sound like a cliché — “you are not alone” — you really are not alone.
8
Yes, it is a cliché that a woman is always a victim and that a woman goes through harder processes than a man, but it is true, it is a fact. If we talk historically, it is a great fact. No one can dispute that, no matter how hard some may try.

9
I adore the experiences that a woman carries. I think — and now I may not sound feminist, but I think being a woman is much better — because we have different experiences, we go through processes, we bring new lives into the world, we can do so many things. We are not even aware of the strength we have — whether physical strength, mental strength, or emotional strength. I think we still haven’t fully realised how much we are capable of.
10
I have become aware that the joy — despite all the difficulties, conditionally speaking — the joy that the experiences only women can have, gives me, and I would never want to have anything else.