The stories behind our names, given or chosen, preserve memories that would otherwise be lost to time. Sko Habibi is the name Jasko Begovic chose when he started identifying as an artist over two decades ago. Sko, short for Jasko, and habibi, the Arabic word for beloved. His name, like his work, is a glimpse at the communities and people who helped him on his journey to create, and survive.
Begovic first heard the word habibi while sitting at the dinner table of a friend’s family. He was a young teen, recently relocated to Germany as a refugee. Even with a full house and over 10 mouths to feed, his friends’ loud and loving Lebanese family were clear that there was always room for Begovic.
Their generosity was the epitome of the immigrant way, making space where there should be none, turning scraps into meals that leave everyone fed and cared for. That ethos is now at the crux of Begovic’s work, and his own drive to create community.
Begovic may finally be getting his flowers from art institutions — his textile sculptures, which bridge the worlds of fashion and soccer, are included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Get in the Game show — but he has been making waves in the Bay Area art scene for years.
As a multimedia textile artist who splits his time between creating art, coaching young soccer players and raising a toddler, Begovic isn’t interested in climbing the ranks of the art world. He isn’t in competition with anyone else (a rule that admittedly gets tossed as soon as he laces up his sneakers and joins a soccer game).
For Begovic, art is how he stays human and asserts his personhood in a world hell-bent on limiting his humanity: as a man raised in a mixed Muslim family, as a genocide survivor, or as a refugee.
Art as a language
Begovic was born in former Yugoslavia and raised in a small village alongside a huge Bosnian family. His childhood was idyllic; warm memories saturate his stories about running around with cousins. But that was before the war in Bosnia began, before his older brother was conscripted, and his family was separated.
At 11, a Serbian uncle hid Begovic and his cousin until they could escape through a soldier exchange. This miraculous intervention allowed him to flee the country, leaving his family’s ancestral land for refugee status in Germany.
It was as a bored kid in the back of a German classroom, surrounded by a language he didn’t understand and peers who had no context for the genocide he had just survived, that Begovic found art.
By chance, he was seated next to a kid named Daniel who scribbled in journals instead of paying attention in class. Watching Daniel write graffiti and practice his tags was Begovic’s introduction to street art, and it became their shared mode of communication.
In former Yugoslavia, art was a craft some students excelled at — Begovic was not a good artist. But suddenly, the function of art shifted. Through his new classmate he was introduced to the world of hip-hop, and the Balkan, African and Arab immigrant communities who were using it to connect to each other.
“It provoked my spirit,” Begovic remembers. “That’s where understanding art as language was birthed in me.”
Depicting ‘the immigrant’s world’
This bridging of language and cultures through art is at the heart of all of his creations. For Begovic, shedding shame around the violence and displacement he experienced frees him up to create. “I embrace it,” he says. “I’m not running away from my journey. I transform it and make it my own.”
This transformation is emphasized in the fabrics he chooses and the stories they tell. He constructs the mannequins wearing his textile pieces to stand tall, with stretched necks and confident stares. Neon colors and deconstructed sports jerseys announce their presence. Begovic sews the names of loved ones who have passed onto the laces of his figures’ shoes in beads, making it clear that each character is an externalization of the grief he carries.
But there is also a performative, comedic aspect to it all. Instead of “Fly Emirates,” Begovic’s soccer shorts have “Fly Refugees” embroidered on them. “It’s playing on the whole Emirates element, the money, the richness,” he says. “It also comes from the flea market culture. Gucci with three Cs, Adidas with four stripes. That’s the immigrant’s world.”
It’s a world familiar to those who are denied entry across many borders. And Begovic’s work opens a window into lives otherwise relegated to the margins.
In November 2024, Begovic performed an art piece at Light Travels (Du Sang), a runway show by the Oakland fashion designer and artist Asaad Bruno. Begovic, inhabiting his Sko Habibi identity, presented Flee Market, a recreation of the refugee reality on the streets of major cities across the globe. The performance opened with Sko Habibi arranging items on a heavy green tarp while speaking to himself in Bosnian. At least a hundred audience members sat quietly, fixated on the nimble movements of the masked man at center of the scene.
Vendors and potential customers joined him. In this staging, the performers were friends, other members of Oakland’s burgeoning arts and soccer community. They passed a soccer ball around, playing with Begovic’s young daughter on the runway. Suddenly, a blaring police sirens cut through the playful atmosphere, sending everyone on the run. In seconds, the tarp was strategically rolled up, and Sko Habibi made his escape. It’s a scene pulled straight from the streets of Paris, where the audio was recorded.
‘Feels like home’
On the seventh floor of SFMOMA, the museum’s blockbuster art-meets-sports show Get in the Game features work Begovic first created for the Oakland Roots and Oakland Soul soccer teams. His original commission of a few pieces turned into over a dozen, and surfaced a number of characters he felt compelled to depict in a short film titled HumanE.T., made in collaboration with the Oakland Roots.
The title plays on the “alien” status imposed on refugees and migrants. “As immigrants, as refugees, on our passports, on our visas it’s like, alien, alien,” Begovic says. “The E.T. comes from [being seen as] extraterrestrial. You are the other, you’re an outsider, you’re a foreigner, you’re a refugee.”
Begovic’s aim, he says, is to transform that othering into something else. “To ask, am I really that different from you?” he says.
During our conversation, Begovic describes his love for spending time at 24th and Mission Streets with his daughter, whose unabashed curiosity helps him see the world around him with wonder and awe. Part of his attraction to the intersection comes from the expressions of life reflecting “back home,” even if it’s not his home.
“I’m not Mexican, I don’t understand a lot of the tradition, and even the food is different, but at the same time the essence of how they go about life and interacting with each other —” he pauses, “when I go there, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m home.’ It’s not Bosnian or Balkan culture, but it feels like home.”
“Maybe that’s what I find in these places, in people that are genuine,” he continues. “Maybe home can be an interaction with a person on the street. It can be a lady that has the same laugh as my mom. Even though my village is so far away, I still find that frequency through other communities, through people, through art.”
Where most see limits and irreconcilable grief, Begovic hears connection and possibility. At the heart of Sko Habibi’s inner world is a child, unafraid to question authority and push back on the dominant narrative. His work asks us to face the scarier feelings without fear; it asks us to sit with others and listen to the stories they want to share and the truths they safeguard. If we do that, maybe we will arrive somewhere even more human.
Work by Jasko Begovic (Sko Habibi) is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in ‘Get in the Game’ through Feb. 18, 2025.