Biography

Belma Bešlić-Gál was born in 1978 in Tuzla, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She began her formal musical education at the age of six under Prof. Planinka Jurišić-Atić, advancing rapidly through the national system of competitions, radio and television broadcasts, public concerts. By twelve, she had become the youngest high school student in Tuzla's history. The world in which that trajectory made sense dissolved within two years: Yugoslavia disintegrated into war, and the path of early recognition gave way to siege, displacement, and the protracted labour of reconstituting a life in Germany, in a language not her own. The entire practice proceeds from these circumstances, and from the conviction they produced: nothing is built on neutral ground.

Following piano studies in Weimar with Gerlinde Otto and Lazar Berman, she pursued composition and music theory at the Kunstuniversität Graz under Bernhard Lang and Klaus Lang, with further studies at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, the Akademie für Neue Musik München, and the Internationales Forum Reutlingen. The resulting body of work spans a wide range of forms: ensemble pieces, music theatre, intermedia installations, generative systems, lecture performances, and web-based terminals. What holds these together is method: composition begins in a concept that is felt before it is heard, and unfolds across all materials at once. Sound, light, silence, time, code: each conditions the others, none governs.

The work has been staged in opera houses and medieval necropolises, inside planetarium domes and single HTML files. For the centenary of Mak Dizdar she transformed the stage of the Narodno pozorište Sarajevo into a field of interference between parallel worlds — actors, ensemble, šargija, video, live broadcast (MAK100, 2017). Seven years later, at the Festival kulture Slovo Gorčina, 3D mapping and multichannel sound unfolded among the six-hundred-year-old tombstones of Radimlja (Iza uma [ΔE×ΔT≥ħ/2×(1–(V²/C²))¹], 2024). Between these two poles, and beyond them: a composition for performance in microgravity (Lacus Temporis, Vienna, 2023), a generative quadraphonic sound installation running from a single HTML file (PЪ7×7, 2026), a lecture performance staging live mining data from a site thirty-five minutes from her own artist residency in central Bosnia and Herzegovina (Pod zemljom, Vienna, 2026).

From 2011 to 2025 she co-curated and, from 2025, directed shut up and listen! in Vienna, a festival for music and sound art that has hosted some five hundred events since 2006. She is now developing PROSTOR Plattform | Festival für Klang, Medien und Diskurs, a new platform for sound, media and discourse across Vienna and Bosnia and Herzegovina, with its first edition in 2027. As Artistic Director of Kultur1/K1_ARt, she conceives and develops site-specific projects in public space together with a team of artists and engineers — concerts, exhibitions, augmented reality installations, discursive formats. Recent editions include a permanent AR bridge connecting Sarajevo and Vienna (K1_ARt.bridges, 2025) and a site-specific AR installation for Klima Biennale Wien 2026. She has been a member of the Rat der Republik at Wiener Festwochen since 2024.

The impulse to build structures extends beyond Vienna. Zvjezdane Staze, an independent artist residency in Mijakovići — a village in the hills above Vareš, central Bosnia and Herzegovina — grew out of a house she acquired in 2019 and became operational in 2024, under Fondacija Prostor, which she founded in 2025. Artistic work requires shelter and autonomy. The structures that provide them are themselves legitimate sites of experimentation.

Systems dissolve. Forms emerge.