Alumni 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2022 2022 Alumni Adelina Luft is an unaffiliated curator whose practice emerged and developed in Yogyakarta (Indonesia) along decolonial lines of thought and modes of working that favor collaboration, processes and interdisciplinarity. Her curatorial projects address trans-local affinities, shared histories, human/nonhuman relations with land, migration and identity. In 2021 she moved to Bucharest where she continues to initiate interdisciplinary and socially-engaged art projects. She collaborates with tranzit.Bucuresti and is a member of the curatorial team for Biennale Jogja Equator 2023, where she previously took on roles as assistant curator in 2017 and residency manager in 2015. Adelina holds a BA from the National University of Political Studies in Bucharest and a MA in Visual Art Studies from Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. She often contributes with translations and texts about Indonesian art, more recently for the book A History of Photography in Indonesia: From the Colonial Era to the Digital Age published by Amsterdam University Press and Afterhours Jakarta. She participated in several curatorial programs: Kuandu Museum of Fine Art in Taipei (2018), ODD in Bucharest (2018), and Curator’s Agenda in Vienna (2016). Anastasia Albokrinova has an education in design and a post-graduate in urban research at Strelka Institute (Moscow). While being a student she and her friends established a self-organisation ‘XI komnat’ which was a studio, exhibition and event space from 2008 to 2011. In 2012 she made a residency at NODE center for curatorial studies. Her work path lead from graphic to exhibition design and brand-design for local museums to working as an assistant curator at Shiryaevo Biennial (2018) and later as a curator of Victoria gallery in Samara (2020-present). There Anastasia is mainly responsible for Victoria Underground space and defines her mission as supporting local artists (from different regions of Russia) and practicing experimental curatorial approaches. Her interest includes, but is not limited to cultural identity and local geography, (post)digital art, performance and contemporary dance, time- and process-based art, artificial intelligence, post-human, hybrid practices. Since 2017 Anastasia joined the team of VolgaFest – an urban culture festival on the Volga embankment in Samara as an art-director. Currently she is in the process of completion of her first book (supported by garage.text grant) ‘Vision hunters: artistic and anomalous experiences on the Volga’ that is based on the exhibition she made in 2020 putting together various cultural and occult practices in local geography. Sabine Wedege (1993, she/her) is a visual artist from Denmark, educated from Jutland Art Academy and Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Works primarily with sculpture, but also with text, video, and sound – used in parallel and in contrast. Researching how to harmonize concept and material, by putting associations in a new frame of references. Occupied with history versus topicality, to connect the past to contemporary issues and questions. Ginevra Ludovici (Rome, 1992) is an independent curator and a Ph.D. candidate at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. Graduated in Economics and Management from Bocconi University and in Contemporary Arts History at Ca’ Foscari University, in 2019 she attended CAMPO – course for curators of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and co-founded the curatorial collective CampoBase. She has carried out collaborations with several institutions, including Carpe Diem Arte and Pesquisa (Lisbon), ASK Research Center – Art, Science, Knowledge (Milan), MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Pushkin Museum (Venice). She deepened her research and training at UNIDEE Academy (Biella), PACT Zollverein (Essen), BAK (Utrecht), SixtyEight Art Institute (Copenhagen), MACBA (Barcelona) and MADRE (Naples). She has published in academic and sector journals, such as PARSE Journal, NERO editions, roots§routes and Made in Mind, and presented her research in different universities, including The University of Arts Belgrade, The Lisbon Consortium and The UK Association for Art History. Her curatorial activity is rooted in collaborative practices, and it develops parallel to her academic research which focuses on radical pedagogy programs, processes of self-institutionalization in the arts, and decolonial theories and practices. She is currently conducting a visiting research period at HDK – Valand, Academy of Art and Design, in Gothenburg, Sweden. Giulia Menegale is an independent curator and editor living in Italy. At the moment, she is a PhD candidate in Analysis and Management of Cultural Heritage at IMT (Lucca, Italy). She investigates transnational solidarity networks as a possible strategy to decentralise and pluriversalize the production and exhibit of arts. In her research, she considers case studies across institutional and non-institutional settings. She holds a BA in Visual Art from IUAV (University of Architecture of Venice) and a MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has collaborated as a curatorial, editorial and research assistant for Looking Forward C.I.C. (London, UK), Castello di Rivoli – Museum of Contemporary Arts (Turin, IT), Island gallery (Brussels, BE) and Taryn Simon Projects (New York, US). Currently, she is editor-in-chief of a series of books on art and theory produced by Ayiné, a Brazilian publishing house (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). Karlygash Akhmetbek is a Kazakhstani socially engaged artist and creative producer of community-oriented educational projects. She holds a BA in Interior Design from the Savannah College for Arts and Design and has experience studying and working in Atlanta, United States, and Hong Kong. As a spatial designer she researches and creates environmentally sustainable solutions for infrastructures, conceptual and immersive spaces that evoke connection. Currently she works in a core team of Artcom Platform Public Association and curates activities for communities around Balkhash lake ecosystems. She designs projects like Beine in order to engage everyone in a community to explore one’s space, its beauties and challenges, and to find new perspectives to address them. Lera Lerner (b. 1988, Leningrad) is an artist, curator, and mediator from St. Petersburg, Russia. Her practice, which she defines as sociopoetic art, is based on mutually educative and inclusive projects. Lerner is interested in helping different communities to create magic safe spaces for sharing and support. She researches everyday rituals of care and joy. She explores how we can blur or accept boundaries of otherness through performative practices of embodied empathy. She believes in coincidence, miracle, intuition and love. She creates spontaneous communication in public space through performances, installations, and research. Lera graduated from the Pro Arte Program for contemporary artists (2015) and completed the MA program in Biology at the Faculty of Biology of St. Petersburg State University (2012). She had projects with the Manifesta biennale in St. Petersburg, Grafikens Hus and LAVA-Dansproduktion in Sweden, Mattress factory in Pittsburgh, CEC ArtsLink in NY, Ars Electronica in Linz, Pro Helvetia Swiss art consul in Moscow, Red Square Festival in Berlin, Agents of Change: Mediating Minorities in Finland, Kone foundation in Finland, Consulate General of Italy in St. Petersburg, Institut français de Russie in St. Petersburg. Since 2017 Lerner is co-curating the Art Prospect public art festival. Simon Gennard is a writer and curator based in Ngāmotu New Plymouth, Aotearoa New Zealand, where he is Assistant Curator Contemporary Art and Collection at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. He has previously worked for Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington; The Dowse Art Museum, Te Awakairangi Lower Hutt; and Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Previous research has examined queer desire, politics and artmaking in Aotearoa. He holds a Master of Arts in Art History from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington (2017). Jelena Andžić is a visual artist from Belgrade, Serbia. She received her MFA in Set Design at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2019 and in 2016 graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. She recently finished the Metàfora Studio Arts diploma course in Barcelona and defended her final thesis at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA) in January 2022. Her artistic practice revolves around the static image and the potential it holds in terms of giving and absorbing knowledge. Her main points of interest are the impenetrability and ambiguity painting inherently possesses, as well as the different roles time plays in painting and photography. She recently had her solo exhibition at N.O. Concept Gallery (Belgrade) and took part in group exhibitions in Homesession (Barcelona), àngels barcelona | Espai 2 (Barcelona), Mutuo galería (Barcelona), Cultural Center Pančevo (Pančevo), Museum of Applied Arts (Belgrade). In 2022 she was a resident at Fabra i Coats: Fàbrica de Creació in Barcelona. She is currently based in Belgrade and works in a studio space in Jugošped building. 2021/20 Alumni Devashish Sharma has a BFA in Painting from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, and an MFA from the Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida. After completing his MFA, he joined the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi as a trainee, and was part of the team responsible for the physical verification and documentation of the art collection. In 2017, he received the Public Art Grant from the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), New Delhi and was able to pursue his interest in setting up a museum for the children of the villages of Kumharpara and Balengapara, Chattisgarh. The Museum of Questions and Imagined Futures is a space for children to think about the future of history in a rural context. Research on architecture and landscapes is a key part of his practice, and in 2019 through a grant funded by the Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi he was able to initiate Road Number Zero, a research project that explores the cusp between rural and urban landscapes within India. His practice revolves around the ideas of bodily experience and movement, and the politics of curating. Devashish is currently based in Bangalore. Beatrice Rubio-Gabriel is an independent curator, writer and performance artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. She finished a double-degree BA in Art History and Theory alongside a BFA from the Monash University School of Art, Design and Architecture, and was the recipient of the BAHCxMUMA Curatorial award at the MADANOW19 exhibition. Centring around a collaborative and experimental practice, she has curated projects that aim to challenge current curatorial and euro-centric modes of exhibiting, and experiments with writing as artform. Her curated projects include /dis/location, MPavilion, Melbourne (2019); The Art of Consumption and The Answers You Need Are Right Where You Are, Intermission Gallery, Melbourne (2019); Revisiting the Quadriennale, CareOf Facility, Milan (2018) and Dwelling Inbetween Here and Some Other Place, Monash Prato Centre, Prato (2018). The former artistic director of Intermission Gallery, she is now currently researching systems of care and intersectional spaces of Resistance Aesthetics. She is also exploring the Baybayin script of the Philippines as a gateway for cultural understanding and re-connection, and how this may be engaged through performance and mark-making. Christophe Barbeau Following a BFA in Quebec City at Université Laval, Christophe Barbeau completed the Master of Visual Studies, Curatorial Studies, at the University of Toronto, Canada, during which his research looked for a political understanding of the position of the “curator” through a specific concept of “authorship”. His projects, as an artist and a curator, have been presented in different group and solo exhibitions in Quebec City, Montreal, Rouyn Noranda, Toronto, Boston, and Nice. Notably : The Die Has Been Cast (2014 Villa Arson, Nice), dans la petite galerie. […] (2014, L’Oeil de Poisson, Quebec City), Dans ce cas-ci (si), […] (2015, Quebec City), Dans le but de décentraliser […] (2016, L’Écart, Rouyn Noranda). In this first stage of projects, the research focused on developing artist’s curated situations of exhibitions where a curatorial strategy was embedded within an artistic practice, specifically through display structures as well as employing strategies of copies, re-makes, re-enactments. Barbeau’s latest exhibitions were entitled : «Qu’avons- nous fait? […] (2019) presented in Toronto; and «and I am the curator of this show1» (2018) presented at the Art Museum University of Toronto in 2018. In this stage of projects, the focus was redirected towards the power relationship specific to the position of the curator, through the use of institutional critique and self-reflexive curatorial gestures, the projects were aiming at deconstructing the conventional and naturalized authorities of the curator, uncovering the political challenges that this figure is facing. 2021/20 2019 Alumni Aigerim Kapar is an independent curator, cultural activist, and founder of the creative communication platform Artcom. She was born in 1987 in Kazakhstan and continues to live and work in Astana. Kapar curates and organizes exhibitions, urban art interventions, discussions, lectures, and workshops. To accomplish such wide-ranging initiatives she often collaborates closely with art and educational institutions, as well as scientific apparatuses. In 2015, she founded the open online platform Artcom in conjunction with the local art community. The platform brings together different cultural figures to share experiences and discover channels for greater interaction within society in order to develop and promote contemporary art and culture. In 2017, Aigerim initiated the Art Collider informal school—when art meets science. Through this initiative artists and scientists jointly conduct research and present lectures and discussions related to current issues. The results of the school are presented through exhibitions, publications, and audio-visual materials. Ana Roman has a Master’s degree in Human Geography from São Paulo University and is a doctoral student in Art History at the University of Essex. Her current research focuses on contemporary art and curatorship. Previously, she was an assistant curator for Between Construction and Appropriation: Antonio Dias, Geraldo de Barros and Rubens Gerchman in the 60s (SESC Pinheiros, São Paulo, Brazil, 2018), and researcher/assistant curator for Ready Made in Brasil(Centro Cultural Fiesp, São Paulo, Brazil, 2017); Rever_Augusto de Campos (SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil, 2016); and Lina Grafica (SESC Pompeia, São Paulo , Brazil, 2014), among others. She was the head curator for Whereabouts (Zipper Gallery, 2018) with works by David Almeida; Mirages (Baro Gallery, 2018) with works by Amanda Mei; and Small Formats (Baro Gallery, 2018) with works by Alexandre Wagner, to name a few. She also writes critical texts for different media outlets. Since 2014, she has been a participant in Sem Titulo, s.d., a production and research collective focused on contemporary art with whom she organized the exhibitions What is not performance? (Centro Universitário Maria Antonia, São Paulo, Brazil, 2015) and Tuiuiu, with works by Alice Shintani (ABER, São Paulo, Brazil, 2017). Bermet Borubaeva is a curator, researcher, and artist. She was born in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and gained her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, and Master’s of Arts focusing on “Political analysis and public policy,” from the High School of Economics in Moscow. She graduated from the Bishkek “Art East” School of Contemporary Art in 2009 and studied at First Moscow Curatorial Summer School for their program “Doing Exhibitions Politically,” initiated by Victor Miziano and V-A-C Foundation. Borubaeva also participated in the curatorial research residency “ReDirecting East” at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Borubaeva has also taken part in different exhibitions and projects, such as the First Youth Central Asian exhibition of Contemporary Art, ON/OFF; the eco-festival, Trash; and an exchange project in collaboration with Focus-Art Association, titled TET A TET #2 (Vevey, Switzerland). Recent projects include the Education Program for Lingua Franca/франк тили’, the re-exhibition project for the Central Asia Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, done in collaboration with Oxana Kapishnikova and Ukhina Diana (2012); the exhibitions Artists-in-Residence at CCI Fabrika (2014–2016 Moscow); the exhibition PAS DE DEUX—KG. CH. at the Center of Contemporary Art Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland; and the performance Café “Non-seller,” addressing the problem of food waste in conjunction with the documentary film “Eco Cup” (Moscow), as part of the Curatorial Research Program, CPR-2017: Mexico. She has also contributed to several publications in the fields of art, political science, and urban environment. Ewa Borysiewicz studied art history at the University of Warsaw and Freie Universität Berlin. She was a member of the curatorial team for Side by Side: Poland—Germany. A 1000 Years of Art and History (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin), led by Anda Rottenberg. She is the author of Rausz kinetyczny (2013), a book exploring the political and emancipatory aspects of non-camera animation. From 2012–2019, she worked at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw as the curator for visual arts. Her duties included establishing international partnerships, programming the international visitors’ program, facilitating artistic residencies, and enabling presentations of Polish art worldwide. She is presently co-organizing (with galleries Stereo and Wschód) the exhibition Friend of a Friend, a gallery-share initiative in Warsaw that has been taking place since 2018. Borysiewicz has also curated and co-curated exhibitions at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf, and the Museum Jerke in Recklinghausen. She is the author of many texts and catalogue entries. Mateja Smic is a Dublin-based artist working with coffee, gelatin and other, often non-traditional materials, chosen by principles of association within her subject matter. Her recent subjects range from geopolitics to national identity. Through printmaking, digital collage, video and animation, Smic’s installations combine philosophical and psychological questions around experience, the phenomenon of Othering, and tensions between the real subject and its mediated representations. Consisting of intensive cycles and processes of intuitive and experimental engagement with her materials, which become a metaphor for an intangible subject, Smic’s reflexive and multi-layered art practice parallels with her contextual research and writing. Having graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Fine Print and Critical Cultures, her thesis and professional practice project focused on the creation of the image of the Balkans in the West and the portrayal of the region through various art forms and curatorial activities. Tomek Pawlowski is a curator, and events and meeting producer. In 2018 he participated in the curatorial program at Swimming Pool, Sofia. He is the curator of numerous exhibitions, performances, and projects in collaboration with artists from younger generations, groups, independent galleries, and institutions in Poland. He uses collective practices, critical entertainment, and politics of friendship as his main guiding framework. From 2016–2018 he ran Cycle, a program of micro-residencies and events in the apartments where he lived. In 2017 co-curated (along with Romuald Demidenko and Aurelia Nowak) The Open Triennial: the 8th Young Triennial at the Center for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. He is also the co-curator (with Magdalena Adameczek and Ola Polerowicz) of Sandra Art Gallery, the nomadic agency associating with and supporting emerging female artists from Poznań. He currently resides between Białystok and Poznań. Shasta Stevic is an artist and curator from Melbourne, Australia. She is the co-founder, co-curator, and creative director of IntraLiminal—an ongoing project that showcases the work of talented young artists from regional Australia. She is passionate about providing opportunities for young artists to share their work publicly and supporting the development of ongoing creative practices in younger generations. Having completed degrees in science and law, she sees art as an important vehicle for the exploration of social issues including the environment and sustainability, civilization and progress, so-called technological and scientific advancement, and the worrying divide between humans and nature. She is particularly interested in using unconventional methods of storytelling and installation to bring about social change. Stevic has studied at the LungA School, an experimental art school in Seydisfjordur, Iceland, and has curated exhibitions for a mid-winter festival in Northern Iceland. Sasha Puchkova is an artist and curator based in Moscow. As an artist, Puchkova works with different media: sound, video, objects, performative communication and experiments. She explores phenomena related to different points of connection and the linking of digital and offline processes, as well as the space between these realms, and the interdependent influence of cyberspace on social norms. Key topics are particular interest to her are the plasticity of the laws of the digital system; the body in online space; new materialism; artificial synesthesia; decolonial pathways; post-cyberfeminist practices; and post-anthropocene practices. The pivot of her curatorial practice revolves around an experimental, expositional approach, which has been realized in such projects as a series of performative actions, ideas around the “exhibition as living space,” long-term laboratories, and the development of theatrical exhibitions-in-real-time, among other things. Her curated projects include Syntax (a series of performances and laboratory); (Im)-possible object (research and exhibition projects); and Capture Map (performative project and communication platform). Puchkova is also a member of the research group “Speculative Practices of Corporal Mutations” (with Katya Pislari and Daria Yuriychuk). Victoria Vargas Downing is a Chilean art historian, heritage researcher and independent curator based Leeds in the UK. She holds a BA in Fine Theory and History of Art at the University of Chile, a Curating Diploma and MA in Arts Management and Heritages studies at Leeds University. Has participated in art projects in Chile, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles CA, Vienna and The UK where she co-curated Imtiaz Dharker Exhibition and participated in the process and management of Chilean Mural restoration at the Leeds Students Union. She has worked as teacher and research assistant in different projects and art organisations in Chile (museums, galleries and non-profit organisations). She is PhD candidate at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at Leeds University. Her research verse on the relationship between contemporary art and heritage, particularly, in non-Western cultures. Seda Yıldız is a Hamburg-based artist-curator. Her multidisciplinary practice focuses on exploring the art of shaping (collective) memory, language, and the politics of the city. She is interested in the poetics of politics and frequently uses humor and abstraction as a tool in her artistic practice, working primarily with video, text, installation, and the form of the artist book. Her curatorial practice focuses on exploring the clash and intersection between the local and global, and aims to reach a heterogeneous audience while giving voice to the silenced. She is particularly is interested to take part in process-oriented, open and experimental projects that foster collaboration and exchange. Yıldız has exhibited her work and joined various editorial and curatorial projects internationally. In 2018, she was selected as an emerging curator by PARALLEL Photo Platform, co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union. Occasionally she writes about design, architecture, and urbanism, and contributed to Brownbook Magazine, MONU Magazine, Kajet Journal, and Freunde von Freunden. Yıldız holds an MA in Contemporary Artistic Practices from Haute école d’art et de design Geneva (2014) and a BA in Communication and Design from Bilkent University (2011). http://yildizseda.com Zulfikar Filandra is a film and theatre-maker based in Sarajevo. Filandra was educated at Griffith College Dublin, the Academy of Performing Arts Sarajevo, and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering Sarajevo. As a collaborator and member of several local and several international art collectives, he has worked with all the relevant mainstream art and cultural institutions in Sarajevo and is also active in Sarajevo’s underground art scene. Aside from directing in film and theatre, and assistant directing, Filandra also works as a screenwriter, lecturer, producer, editor, musician, actor, promoter, event organizer, and photographer. As a member of the youngest generation of Bosnian directors his topics touch on the legacy of war in Bosnia, but through a more intimate view of living in contemporary times and the position of a small culture like Bosnia in a globalizing world. Currently, he is actively collaborating with the Experimental Film Society (based in Dublin, Ireland) and Outline (based in Amsterdam, Netherlands). Filandra completed two short films in 2018 and is currently working on two more short films, while also developing his first feature project, titled Shipbuilding. At the moment, Filandra is in the process of founding and starting the first full-time artist-in-residence program in Sarajevo. Martina Yordanova is a curator, writer, and researcher based in Sofia, Bulgaria. She graduated from the University of Vienna in Publicity and Communication Sciences in 2014. She went on to do her postgraduate studies in Cultural Management and Curatorial Practices at different European educational institutions, including the University of Arts Berlin, Goldsmiths University, Institute for Cultural Concepts Vienna, and The Cultural Academy in Salzburg. Currently, she works in Sofia where in 2016, together with architects Galya Krumova and exhibition designer Petya Krumova, she established a non-profit foundation for contemporary art and media. Since then, Yordanova has been initiating different art events and exhibitions with international and Bulgarian artists, mostly living abroad. She is also the founder and curator of “1m2 of Art”—a project based in Veliko Tarnovo wherein every month a different artist from the local art scene presents their work in a space no bigger than its name. 2019 2018 Alumni Agustina Andreoletti works within the realms of research, writing, discussion, publishing and exhibition making. Her practice reflects on the unstable overlap between material, social and political processes; especially as such relations develop over time. Andreoletti is currently a Postgrad fellow at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Ivana Čavić is an artist based in Serbia and currently studies photography at The Academy Of Arts Novi Sad. Her photographic practice is an exploration of narration and context, focused on creating visual narratives that question boundaries of documentation and fiction, private and public. With research based work she is often playing with photographic and textual narratives which trigger a dialogue about different readings of personal histories and memories. She participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, and international collaborative projects. Jovana Vasić is a student of interdisciplinary doctoral studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade on the program Theory of Arts and Media. With the mentor Nikola Dedić she is working on the thesis – The critical institutional theory of the Museum of Contemporary Art. She writes and publishes papers in the field of art theory. In her previous work, she dealt with the issues of the transposition of personal narratives in the form of memories through the relationship between the public and the private. 2018 Karen Vestergaard Andersen is a curator and writer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her curatorial practice explores alternative research methods though open artistic dialogue with the aim of generating new curatorial methodologies that are both critically engaging and context sensitive. Her research interests and methodologies derive from an intersectional approaches to queer / feminist discourse and New Materialist theory. Her writing has appeared in various artists’ catalogues and publications, including at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Nikolaj Kunsthal, as well as in Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics, Danske Museer and Notes on Metamodernism. Kirila Cvetkovska is an independent researcher, curator and artist from Macedonia. After studying art history and psychology in Rome, Italy, she has been involved in the cultural programming of the non-profit Tevereterno (both in Rome and NYC). Currently, she is living in Macedonia, while also collaborating with artists in Italy on experimental art projects. Kirila’s personal practice dwells on the themes of collective memory, loss and detachment, analyzing the cross-cultural values that encompass these issues, while liberating oneself from the restraints of consumerism. She is attempting to bring art to a much wider audience, in places without a largely established art scene. Marta Saccavino obtained her MA degree in Art History, University of Leeds, UK. In her academic work she focused on artists coming from “relative peripheries”, a concept explored by Maria Lind. Her current researches focus at the close relationship between art and cinema, specifically on how television intervenes and shapes this relationship, which began with the invention of cinema itself, and it is often analysed without taking in consideration the latter element. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on sacred and profane relics with an emerging fashion designer and the Morgagni Museum in Padua. Milena Jokanović is a research-fellow at the Art History Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade where she obtained her PhD recently. She has also obtained MA diploma at the UNESCO Chair for Cultural Policy and Management at the University of Arts, Belgrade and Université Lumière Lyon. Her research interests therefore span the museology, use of the historical models of collecting in modern and contemporary art, theories of memory and identity construction and cultural heritage management. She curated several exhibitions, has written many papers and managed few cultural projects. Nina Mihaljinac is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arts in Belgrade in the field of cultural management and cultural policy. She works as a project manager for Creative Creative Europe Serbia at the Ministry of Culture of RS. She obtained her doctorate in Arts and Media at the University of Art in Belgrade in 2017. She has participated in numerous national and international research projects and has published several monographs and dozens of papers in the field of art theory, culture of memory, management in culture and cultural policy. Neva Lukić has completed her master’s degree in art history and archaeology from the University of Zagreb, and in theory of modern and contemporary art at Leiden University. She has professional experience in museum curatorship (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka), as a freelance curator (Croatian Association of Artists – Zagreb, Arti et Amicitiae – Amsterdam, See Lab – The Hague, etc.) and as an art critic (active member of Croatian section of AICA – the International Association of Art Critics). She has published four books (poetry & short stories) and one picture book for children. Ruri Kawanami is a Berlin based curatorial assistant working at the intersection of artistic production and critical writings. She studied cultural science at post-graduate level at Humboldt-University in Berlin, where she specialized in the museum epistemology of the early 20th century. From 2014 to 2017, she worked as a curatorial assistant at the Japanese literature museum in Berlin. Teodora Nikčević graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje 2009. Since 2012 she has worked as a curator at the Center for Contemporary Art of Montenegro CSUCG in Podgorica. She actively exhibits at individual and group exhibitions in the country and abroad and participates in numerous residential and art projects. Her work at the CSUCG is focused on the promotion and affirmation of young artists. She was a curator of group exhibitions and led a series of interviews with artists – Artist talks. Tjaša Pogačar works as a freelance writer, editor and curator of exhibitions and discursive programs for various institutional and noninstitutional contexts since 2010. In her work she is concerned with systemic operations of contemporary art and the limits and possible further developments of institutional critique. Some of her recent curatorial and editorial projects look at how contemporary art practices and institutions deal with the current techno-capitalist conditions. She is a co-founder and editor of ŠUM, journal for contemporary art criticism and theory and is currently working as an assistant curator at the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana. Vera Zalutskaya is a contemporary art curator. Her interests are mainly in art of Eastern and Central Europe in the context of postcolonial studies. In 2014 she graduated from the European Humanities University in Vilnius (educational program Theory and practices of contemporary art). Studied also Art history and Culturology: comparative studies of civilization on the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. As a member of different collectives or independently she organized and curated many exhibitions in Belarus and Poland. Zohreh Deldadeh is a freelance art scholar and curator based in Tehran. She started her career as an executive manager in Iranian Art Publishing and Tavoos Contemporary Art Online Magazine; she was part of Mohsen Gallery, one of the leading contemporary art galleries in Tehran; Pejman Foundation’s team as an assistant director and assistant curator in two venues of the foundation (Argo Factory and Kandovan Building). Moreover, she has collaborated as a coordinator, project manager and co-curator with other galleries and art institutions in Iran and abroad. Aleksandra Mikić obtained BA degree in Art History, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade. Her interests are in the art of post Yugoslavian period in conditions of transition. In her researches she is focusing on art practices as social symptoms in the context of biopolitics and biopower. Anna Tudos is a freelance curator from Budapest, Hungary. She completed the Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) MLitt course at the Glasgow School of Art in 2017 after her studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. She is particularly interested in exploring hidden histories and underrepresented issues often through unconventional ways of mediating art. Her recent collaborations include OverOverOver, an artist exchange between Detroit and Glasgow and BRUT Europe with artist Marija Nemcenko. She co-hosts the show ‘Radio Dacha’ on Subcity Radio, exploring the notion of the „East” through discussion and music. Biljana Puric is an independent researcher. She holds Masters Degrees in Film Aesthetics from the University of Oxford, and in Gender Studies from the Central European University. She has published peer-reviewed articles, along with art and film reviews and criticism, in Issues in Ethnology & Anthropology, ARTMargins, Journal of Curatorial Studies, New Eastern Europe, and Short Film Studies. Rebecca Vaughan is a Melbourne based curator and writer. Previously Rebecca was Museum Assistant and Administrator at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) and Editorial Assistant at Perimeter Books, a small arts publishing imprint based in Melbourne. She holds a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne. < Participants Educational Program Programs > Up

Alumni Alumni 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 < Participants Educational Program Programs >

Program Participant Activities Program Participant Activities 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 Tonight we invite you to encounter a collective archive of the 2022 What could/should curating do educational programme, which took place in Belgrade and other locations around the Post-Yugoslav region, between September and December this year. The departure point for this archive is a proposal by Biljana Ćirić, program curator and facilitator, to consider the means by which the discussions, events, inquiries and relationships developed during this time might be recorded or documented. Archiving is never neutral. Determinations are always made—by individuals, by collectives, by collecting institutions—about what knowledge is worth saving, the means by which knowledge is indexed, housed and cared for, who has access and on what terms. Within the framework of an alternative educational platform—with a loose and evolving curriculum, and no formalised method of assessment or grading—this exercise presents an opportunity to consider what alternative measures we might allow ourselves for the production of knowledge when freed from institutional modes of transmission and circulation. As such, these archives—both individually and collectively—do not simply record a series of shared (and at times differing) experiences. They include questions around how the embodied, linguistic, political, intimate, relational nature of experience and remembering, ranging in scope from the personal, to the national. Each contribution is informed by the “baggage” we carried with us, as a group of individuals from many different geographic and cultural contexts, many of whom had little relationship with Belgrade, Serbia or the Balkan region prior to this course. This “baggage” includes our different relationships to contemporary art’s infrastructures; our different fields of knowledge and networks of relationships; cultural and linguistic differences; differing relations to histories of colonialism, resource extraction and capitalist exploitation; and varying habits of thought, modes of making, inhabiting and formulating questions about the world. Through differing strategies of presentation and circulation, we hope to open up questions about what we have in common, as well as what separates us; what of ourselves is dispersed, and what is withheld. But the physical “archive” we share with you tonight is only a part of a wider set of relationships, experiences, idea exchanges, occasional encounters, gossip and experimenting. Tonight we celebrate the beauty and fragility of these moments. Be our guests at the two tables. Read silently. Read aloud. Whisper. Describe what you see. Share what you feel. Eat. Drink. Embrace. This archive is staged as something living, developing and transformational, ever evolving as our moments with you. Thank you for sharing this journey with us. We hope it’s not the end, but only a stop on the way. WC/SCD 2022 Adelina, Anastasia, Ginevra, Giuglia, Jelena, Karly, Lera, Sabine, Simon < Participants Educational Program Programs >

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

Open call: WCSCD Educational program 2025/2026 Drawing by Stefan Ilic Start of Open call: January 7th 2025 Deadline for submission: February 28th 2025 We will reach shortlisted candidates for interview by March 10th 2025 Final program participants list to be announced: March 20th 2025 Program starts: end of August 2025 (final date to be confirmed after participant selection). Duration of program: eight months on site: three months total (end of august to end of October 2025 + April 2026). In between onsite sessions there will be online workshops and gatherings twice a month from November 2025 until March 2026. The WCSCD educational program is open to artists, curators, and cultural workers seeking to develop different working methodologies that respond to urgent challenges facing cultural work today. Through collective learning and rooted in our shared realities we will explore and practice different methodologies, embracing failure as an essential part of the learning process. Our learning gestures are aimed towards deconstructing how, where and with whom knowledge is produced and made public, and who we cite in the process. The 2025/2026 educational project continues WCSCD’s self-reflective development of instituting through collective thinking and practicing. Together, we explore possible institutional models that transcend traditional binaries: rural/urban, culture/nature, and woman/man. This work builds on the foundations laid by previous program participants, creating bridges between different generations' methodologies and knowledge. While previous program participants looked at historical examples of artistic practices in rural areas of the Balkans, the focus of the upcoming program will be researching situated practices of instituting in the region that are still active and that offer different propositions on relationality and ways of instituting. Special emphasis throughout the program will be given to exploring ways of practicing in times of scarcity and ways to continue situated work in a meaningful way. We will question and practice responses to questions such as: What kind of exhibitions do we really need? Can we re-define the purpose of the exhibition? Can we practice the exhibition as a learning opportunity? How can we reinstall learning in exhibition making as Chus Martinez asks? The program is conceived by Biljana Ciric, founder of WCSCD, in collaboration with curator Laura Rositani, who participated in a previous WCSCD program. It is locally coordinated and situated in collaboration with The Shock Cooperative and S.K.U.P. The program mentors are: Chus Martinez (director of the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, where she also runs the Institute’s exhibition space Der Tank), Nina Montmann (Professor of Art Theory at the University of Cologne, curator, writer, and PI at the Global South Study Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne), Sergio Montero Bravo (architect, designer, researcher, and member of Inland), Lara Khaldi (director of de Appel), Toby Upson (writer), Robida (collective that works at the intersection of written and spoken words – with Robida Magazine and Radio Robida – and spatial practices developed in relation to the village of Topolò/Topolove , where the collective is based). This edition of the program will be situated in Novi Sad city, 30min by train from Belgrade. WCSCD’s educational program was established in 2018 and is mostly situated in Belgrade. It is an international program for artists and curators. Having both curatorial and artistic positions in close proximity is very important for WCSCD. In many places that lack an art infrastructure, these positions constantly merge, complement and support one another. The WCSCD educational program has been a testing ground for creating a collective learning site and a space to think about how to institute differently. The central place of the educational program in WCSCD’s activities has been vital to the institution. The program has helped guide us, creating a space to collectively consider many practical questions as well as to think about our future. Practical information No prior degree in art or art history are required in order to apply. The program is organized through different sequences. Workshops are held four days a week with mentors and WCSCD colleagues. Selected participants will be provided reading material and instructions for preparation prior to the program. The course fee is charged according to your country income (you need to be a passport holder of that country). For lower income countries, the 2025/2026 program fee is 450 euros. For lower and middle-income countries, the 2025/2026 program fee is 750 euros. For middle and upper-income countries, the 2025/2026 program fee is 1300 euros. For high income countries the program fee is 2200 euros Please use this reference for your country income: https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups Payments should be made in advance and in instalments if needed. We encourage individuals and institutions to support cultural workers’ education through supporting their participation in the program. About your stay: The program fee doesn’t include cost of travel to Serbia and Novi Sad, or research trip costs. For the two-month stay in 2025, seven days of the program will take place in the countryside on land that WCSCD has taken custodianship of, while the rest of the program will be in Novi Sad. Food and accommodation in the village will be covered by WCSCD, while participants will need to cover accommodation costs in Novi Sad as well as costs of the research trip. The research trip will be to Topolo Robia for a duration of four days in 2025. For the one month stay in 2026 the same conditions apply. How to apply Applications should include the following items as a single Word or PDF document: a letter of interest stating your reasons for applying to the program your biography and CV portfolio Send your application by email to what.could.curating.do [at] gmail.com with the subject line: Educational program -WCSCD 2025/26

Anne Bourrassé < Back Art as barrier gestures Anne Bourrassé Early mornings collide with long evenings. Tuesday is like Friday, and Saturday runs without sleep. News are so often repeated that it falls into the norm. The days pass by. Without natural light in the apartment my shadow disappear. It appears behind my back, twice a week, on my way to buy basic necessities. All that remains to be done then is to reconquer the “infra-ordinary”, as Georges Perec calls it, to enchant the usual. There is nothing usual about the crisis. It does, however, impose new attitudes on us, by freezing the binary rhythm. It defines a space for our movements and its choreography of useful gestures. Locked up, the right foot more rarely exceeds the left foot, and vice versa. Big is the magnitude of the situation, small is the space of our condition. How can we extract ourselves from it and apprehend it in new forms? See this crisis as an object in its own right, understanding its language and the tone of its appearances, deducing from it the means of artistic action, even ephemeral and solid. How can we propose an image for the invisible ? How can we lend a material to the impalpable? Artists, curators, critics, operate at a distance to make the sensation of reality take off and allow creation to emit new frequencies. Geographically isolated, but united in the experience of the environment. The studio moved to the home, in a context that constrains us in our possibilities and tools. At the same time, the situation delivers its own atmosphere, it defines its point of view, its materials, its sonorities, and its colours. Resource of inspiration, it sets the tone of time. Art thus becomes a rampart to agitation with its own barrier gestures. Respect the distance with your subject. Listen to your environment. Favour the tools at your disposal. Use your hands regularly. Anne Bourrassé is an independent curator, fostering the interactions between visual arts and humanities. Previous Next

< Back “Bor is burning” [1]: the political economy of IT in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia 20 Dec 2020 Robert Bobnič and Kaja Kraner Back to the future! At the entrance to the Bor copper mining complex (RTB Bor) where one of the pits is situated, a large board reads, “Politics of security and protection of the environment: life first, we have to care for our environment.” The signage is in Chinese and Serbian (though not its Cyrillic script). Nearby lies a monument to the victims of a labor camp in the Bor mine during World War II. The Third Reich was one of many who had dug a mine at this location within the past 7, 000 years, and when the Kingdom of Yugoslavia capitulated in 1941, they took over the mine shortly after, establishing around twenty labor camps known for a special kind of torture. People had to work barefoot and naked – some were executed: hung with their heads towards the ground as if to be some kind of monument. It is very quiet – almost too quiet – for a mine. As we look at the empty halls (which in the socialist heyday would have been filled with workers dining and changing clothes), two young engineers – one of them emphasizing that nowadays more female engineers work at the mine – ironically say, “we are going back to the eighties. ” After the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia, during the isolation of Serbia (owing to the international sanctions during the 1990s) and their period of privatization, RTB Bor was sold to the Chinese state-owned Zinjin corporation in 2017. Bor mining facilities is now under the process of reconstruction and automation as a part of Chinese investment in the Balkan region. Is this the coming of another wave of modernization, another acceleration – another colonization – as suggested by the vague perception of a Chinese techno-capitalist entry (through the Balkans) into Europe? Discussing the question of Sinofuturism, Chinese philosopher of technology, Yuk Hui, claims it “runs in the opposite direction to moral cosmotechnical thinking – ultimately, it is only an acceleration of the European modern project.” [2] It is therefore a project, which according to the moral attitude in the current age of ecological thinking, cares neither for life nor for the environment. Monument of the victims of labor camp at the entrance in Bor mine (left). Zinjin headquarter in Bor (right). One mine, 7, 000 years of cosmos A penetrated surface – the hole in the earth. Mankind not only got to his feet and looked up to the sky where he was blinded by the sun, but also began to dig into the earth’s past to exploit it for his own (re)production and preservation . We could say that to enter the mine is to enter geological and cosmological deep time – [the] accumulated dead labor of the cosmic economy, accessible only by the technics of mining conducted by the living labor of humans, tools, science, and machines. The latter is quite clear in the case of RTB Bor, where copper and gold mining dates back to at least 5000 BC. Nowadays, we can only imagine the importance of mining in the formation of different cosmologies from surrounding cultures during the prehistoric and historic, or premodern and modern, periods. During the modern era, the technics of mining not only became industrialized, but functioned as the basis for industrial technological development – mining, and nature in general, is a standing reserve for energetic and infrastructural potential. The latter holds true both for the heavily industrialized 19th century and heavily informationalized 21stcentury, where mining and data mining came to form a particular synthesis. Strictly speaking, mining could be understood as one of the most fundamental practices underpinning cosmotechnics. The concept of cosmotechnics was coined by Yuk Hui as a departure from the epistemological, social, and material framework of the European project of modernization. The latter was based on the ontological difference between nature and culture by means of modern technological development and its corresponding way of technological thinking, in which technics is understood as a mediation tool between the order of nature and order of culture. In this regard, it is important to note that cosmotechnics (as a concept and methodology) emphasizes a cosmological understanding of technology, not an anthropological one. This fundamental change in conceptualization – the elimination of the basic human-centricity, characteristic of Western modernity – became possible when the whole world (nature and cosmos included) began to function as a giant computational machine. For this reason, Hui is not conducting a backdoor exit through some nontechnological return, but rather, suggests an exit through technics itself. In the middle of technological geneses – as is modern technology – lies an entire cosmos of the totality of nature and technics: a particular technological genesis as well as a particular cosmology, i.e., the way different cultures understand the universe and comprehend the order of things, be it in the form of myth, magic, or science. In the specific case of Europe, the entire cosmic totality of nature and technics includes understanding the technology which endowed particular nation states with their competitive advantage in the colonial and economic subjection of the rest of the world. These are indistinguishable from capitalist modes of production. While developing the concept of cosmotechnics, Hui’s initial question asks why there was no technological development in China as it happened in the West, given that China had material conditions for such a development. In embarking on an answer, he suggests that the reason lies in the different cosmology of Chinese culture. It is devoid of the concept of technology as operated and understood in the West (beginning with the famous Greek techne , until its synthetic finalization at the start of the 20th Century with the end of metaphysics by cybernetics, as understood by philosopher Martin Heidegger). In this sense, China’s current technocapital power, and corresponding Sinofuturism, is therefore based on the appropriation and acceleration of the Western concept of technology after the Opium wars and late socialist modernization. Cosmotechnics encapsulates diversity, however not in the form of cultural diversity (the idea of multiculturalism itself being the product of modernization and colonialism), but in the form of technological diversity. Thus, the question of locality is wedged open (again, not locality as a result of cultural identity, but locality as the product of technical means). However, Hui states: “Cosmotechnics is not simply about different ways of making things, for example, different techniques of knitting or dying,” it is above all, “the unification of the moral and the cosmic through technical activities. […] This cosmological specificity must be rethought beyond astral physics, beyond the conceptualization of the universe as a thermodynamic system; it also reopens the question of morality beyond ethical rules, which are added posteriorly as constraints to new technologies. Technical activities unify the moral order and the cosmic order; and by unification, I mean reciprocal processes which constantly enforce each other to acquire new meanings.” [3] This is one way to say that technology is not neutral – not only in the sense of its use but also its existence. Perhaps this also means that cosmotechnics functions more as a perspective and less as a concept, and for that reason cannot be transmitted from one place or history to another without alteration. Prehistoric mining tools in Museum of mining and metallurgy Bor (left). Zinjin flag at the entrance to the mining hole (right). Balkan, time and (deep) time again This is where our initial question comes in: can we reconstruct a specific Balkan cosmotechnics? The formulation of this question emerged precisely from the specific case of RTB Bor and is of particular importance when considering at least two distinct elements: (1) the extreme duration of mining activities and natural resource exploitation ranging through many different cosmologies, cultures, politics, and economies; (2) the period of modernization, which unfolded during the existence of socialist Yugoslavia. The latter is the focus of the current stage of our research. The modern history of mining in Bor started in the late 19th century, when a rich Serbian industrialist, Djordje Vajfert, was looking for gold. He [mostly] found copper, though some gold as well. French capital soon entered and the French Company of the Bor Mines, the Concession St. George, began mining in 1904. In Bor you can still see the old flamboyant French houses where French management lived. In comparison, workers were all living in wooden housing. But technological development and modernization in Bor came with the birth of socialist Yugoslavia. The mine was nationalized in 1945, and the industrial town was gradually built around it. Due to the importance of mining in modern industry and the resulting “cult of work”, Bor attained a special status within Yugoslav culture and its collective imagination. It is this status, and subsequent turbulence of the postsocialist period, that now leads it to face Chinese technological investment as the inscription of Bor in global technocapitalistic unification (which rejects cosmotechnical difference). This is the starting point for opening an inquiry of whether we can speak of a specific Balkan socialist cosmotechnics, i.e., a specific local understanding of technology. The question is important because it transcends the entrapment of Balkan and socialist Yugoslavia tradition in the form of cultural curiosity (from being part of the globalized multicultural world in which socialism ceased to represent a threat to the Western capitalist – and from the start, a technocapitalist – project). Still, Balkans is the name of a specific cultural and political locality where mainly South Slavs have resided for centuries under distinct mythological traditions and religious cultures. Due to its geographical position (and resulting unique political and economic position), the Balkans has been of special importance for many imperialist powers. The region as a whole also holds the position of the Other to either/both the West or the East, and besides that, has always been “out[side] of the world”: free-floating in space, endowed with a nonhuman and noncivilized imaginary. After the period of political unification in the 19th century and the consequently established Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the early 20th century, the region fully integrated under the banner of [a] socialist project, which in case of Yugoslavia acquired a specific positionality between the Western and Eastern bloc – clear in the fact that they implemented a Western technoscientific (cosmotechnical) projection in a supposedly socialist way. If we propose the idea in this way, we must differentiate the alleged unity of the European modern objective based on a specific unifying concept of technology. In other words: we must consider – and question – the difference between the capitalist and socialist objective of modernization. The key question is therefore: are there any differences in how socialist projects enacted an understanding of cosmos and nature through technical means? Since there exists an overlapping sphere of technological thinking between capitalist and socialist alternatives – materialized especially in the totalizing science of cybernetics, which functions as an epistemic unified cosmotechnics without a specific locality – we can also pose an additional question: did socialism enact specific cosmotechnics when it implemented technological and cybernetic thinking? Since [the] Bor mine was one of the first industries in Yugoslavia where cybernetic thinking and computer technology had been installed (the earliest example of Yugoslav computational modernization), we can lay the basic methodological groundwork: contrasting Heidegger’s understanding of technology (which already totalizes the concept of technology on a philosophical level) with Marx’s understanding of technology. From this, and by referring to the implementation of computer technology and management automatization in the industry when examining the Bor mine, we can pose the following question: why did technological progress in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia slow down at some point? Components from Univac computer, installed in Bor mine in late 1950s. Source: Visa Tasič, Principal Research Fellow of Mining and Metallurgy Institute Bor. Why did technological progress in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia slow down at some point? By posing this question, we are directly referring to the development of computer technology at RTB Bor as explained by one of our colleagues, a researcher and a former employee at the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, dr. Dragan R. Milivojević: When I wrote the article “Half a Century of Computing in the Serbian Copper Mining and Metallurgy Industry” [4] for a very reputable American journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computering… and – when you write such an article, you send it and it is reviewed by the peer reviewers [who] demand you correct something, etc. – the thing they asked me the most was to explain where this interruption of our development occurred. They remembered us in the rank of Finland and Czechoslovakia, because from 1946 to 1950 those three countries – Yugoslavia, Finland and Czechoslovakia – were technologically at the same level. This is what they were most interested in, and of course I had to explain it a little bit, I had to find the literature on what was in those other countries, and I found out we really haven’t lagged behind at all. We are suggesting that the answer to this question can present a good starting point to emphasize specific understandings of science and technology within the framework of Marxism – the official ideologic, economic and political basis of “real existing socialism”. In the first phase, Marx’s, or more broadly, Marxist understanding of technology (from which the socialist policies regarding technological development in Yugoslavia stemmed) must be differentiated from Heidegger’s (who is predominantly considered the key philosophical representative of the modern Western understanding of technology). The main difference emerges from the fact that Marxism perceives science and technology in its indistinguishable relation to the capitalist mode of production, marked with the broader move from the perception of natural resources as the main source of value towards human resources as the main source of value . Science and technology in Marxism are therefore not so much understood in its relation to nature, but in relation to human nature, whereby presupposing the context of (in Foucauldian terms) governmentality and biopolitics – characteristic of the (Western) modern period. The latter can be understood as a condition of the possibility for Marx’s labor theory of value; Marxist perception of science-technology relation; the linkage of scientific-technological development with the problem of alienation; and especially the ‘institutionalization’ of the split between the manual and intellectual labor – broadly speaking: class perspective on technological development. The establishment of “human capital” (if we would use the classic neoliberal term) as a fundamental of Marxist understanding of technology and technology-nature relations, inevitably led to the (self)limitation of potentially exponential, technological socialist progress. Socialist technological “catching up” since the mid-20th century, driven by the logic of economic rationality, at some point clashed with the logic of the development of social relations. In the specific case of self-governing, socialist Yugoslavia, the latter can be especially seen in the formal equalization of IT experts with all other employees, which led to difficulties implementing critical technological innovation on a micro social level. Dragan R. Milivojević explains this as: […] It was a time of socialist self-management. That period was very interesting. I am not qualified to talk about it, but I can talk about my experience of that period because I’ve lived and worked in [it]: we had terrible difficulty putting an expert idea into practice because at [the] time it was ideologically necessary for all the working people to agree with that idea – all those employed in [the] particular organization. […] The complex organization of the joint work RTB Bor had 23,000 employees, in each relatively autonomous unit of RTB Bor, an assembly of working people had to happen – an assembly of all of the employees – and more than 50% of them [must] vote for this idea. The voice of the lady who [made] coffee and my voice were considered equal. It’s funny but it was a reality. [5] The Socialist “monopole” of state politics/party over the economy, or more specifically, workers’ involvement in the management of factories and their development, in its first phase (at least in theory) tried to reduce established differentiation between intellectual and manual labor by including workers in the decision-making processes. In the case of RTB Bor, the latter can be explicitly perceived by (in all the big factories in Yugoslavia) the mandatory worker’s magazine which shared all crucial information regarding the company’s leadership; investments; its annual loses and profits, etc. The transparency of the factory’s management established this as a common matter, which effectively activated [the] worker’s sense of responsibility (worker’s self-management goes hand in hand with the production of their responsibility [i.e., moral training], which is specific to the socialization rather than individualization of responsibility), and presented that company or factory as a collective. Worker’s magazine “Rudar” (“The Miner”). Source: Bor Library (Bor, Serbia). Did socialism enact specific cosmotechnics when it implemented technological and cybernetic thinking? And could a Marxist understanding of scientific and technological development be the starting point to answer this question? At current stage of our research, we cannot fully answer to the complexities these questions unravel, and in general we see our outlined inquiry as relatively modest: primarily questioning the unification of modern Western cosmotechnics. However, we can further emphasize the Marxist determination of scientific and technological progress in four main goals and its consequences (consequences that can be also seen in specific case of RTB Bor’s socialist period). Those goals are: (1) joint control, (2) rational regulation, (3) minimum power consumption, (4) conditions that are most worthy of human nature and are best suited to it (i.e. demand creative work). [6] Technology itself is largely understood as a synonym for material production (and the opposite of a spiritual one), whereby the main idea is that a society’s material foundations (technical included) are closely related to social change. Technological and scientific development and progress are therefore potential tools for social development and progress; they are seen as a moving force of history, rather than mere liberation of humankind from nature. The industrial revolution of the 19th century, which established the idea of nature as a form of energy in service to the needs of humankind, is defined as a condition for the possibility of a higher form of society, i.e. communist society based on the ideal of creative work (for instance, as manifested in arts). Technology in Marxism is therefore not so much understood within the framework of the Greek techne (an activity that does not satisfy in itself and is, above all, the means of developing other activities. [7] For instance, ars as an activity where human freedom is manifested and this freedom is understood as freedom from the natural laws of necessity , or human’s general susceptibility to nature – including his own). Marxist understanding of technics and technology is not strictly instrumental, objectivist (nature as a means of supply for humans), or idealist. Namely, at least in principle and programmatic terms, Marxism eliminated the differentiation between techne and physis . Technology is therefore a means of human expression, a channel where human activity comes within proximity to the autopoietic creativity of nature, characterized by the merging of techne, poiesis and physis . Since the concept of cosmotechnics encapsulates the nature-technics relation, in this regard we could add that in a socialist society, the ideal of nature’s productivity is established as the very basis for [a] communist society ideal. Naturally, this is all theory, though it does prompt us to think on (socialist) practice or – better yet – real, existing socialist technics? Robert Bobnič is a Ph.D. Kaja Kraner is an independent researcher, lecturer, and curator. [1] The phrase is a reference to the Serbian alternative rock band, Goribor (literally translates to: Burning Bor ) originating from the town of Bor. The band got its name based on the impression of a large fire over the town due to the process of copper smelting slag being separated from copper. [2] Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics , Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2018, p. 297. [3] Yuk Hui, Machine and Ecology, Angelaki 25:4, 2020, p. 54-66. [4] The article “Half a Century of Computing in the Serbian Copper Mining and Metallurgy Industry” was published in co-authorship with Dragan R. Milivojević, Marijana Pavlov (Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, Serbia), Vladimir Despotović (University of Belgrade, Serbia) and Visa Tasić (Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, Serbia) in IEEE Annals of the History of Computering in 2012. [5] From the interview with Dragan R. Milivojević, retired researcher of Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, Serbia conducted in Belgrade (Serbia) on 22th of October 2020. [6] Andrej Kirn, Marxovo razumevanje znanosti in tehnike (Marx’s understanding of science and technology) , Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1978, p. 226. [7] It is quite evident, Greek understanding of technics follows an already established class division of labor as the basis of antient Greek society: among others, the division between the free citizens and the enslaved ones executing manual labor. Previous Next

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities Public Moments WCSCD Educational program 2025/2026 at SKUP For the Iteration of WCSCD educational program 2025/2026 we are pleased to announce following public moments in formats of public lectures, screenings and other forms of gathering. The public moments are organized in collaboration with SKUP and Sok Cooperative. Meet the program participants Time: September 5th 19:00 Venue: SKUP, Novi Sad, Bulevar Despota Stefana 5, Meet program participants through public sharing — Lecture by Nina Montmann Decentring the Museum. Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies Time: September 10th , 2025, 19:00 Venue: SKUP Novi Sad Nina Montmann lecture is taking point of departure of her recently published book Decentering the Museum: Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial legacy. Montmann in the book acknowledges transition processes towards decolonization, de-elitiziation, giving emphasis on importance of moving away from collection, exhibition policies that are based on European colonial legacy of institutional rituals that will be also addressed at the lecture. — Lecture by Marina Christodoulidou Assembling Land: Rehearsals towards Placemaking Time September 19th 2025, 19:00 Venue: SKUP Novi Sad Delving into pressing themes surrounding Land —particularly its ownership and use— de Appel takes curatorial practice as a means of commoning. Curatorial projects referenced during the talk engage with co-ownership, both as a structure and a concept, by learning from the diverse experiences, practices, and perspectives of/with lumbung. It further questions how crises of land and housing engage with an art institution, and asks: how could we co-own a place? How might an art institution practice co-ownership, both practically and poetically? In principle, de Appel anchors its inquiries in curatorial work: How can we curate exhibitions today in relation to concerns about land and urban crises? How might art institutions contribute to social housing movements and struggle against land grabbing and individual ownership? The public lecture by Marina Christoulidou is supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgrade. — Lecture by Toby Upson A practice of Artwriting Time October 3d, 2025, 19:00 Venue: SKUP Novi Sad Folding A.V. Marraccini's approach to criticism into Anne Carson’s notion of desire as well as Bruce Hainley’s practice, Toby Upson lecture will explore 'commensal' approaches to writing. Rather than a mode of writing 'about' a thing, 'writing to' or 'with' a thing, this approach recognises the innate agency of a thing, asking a writer to enter into a relationship with it and to write that space. < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

< Back Seeing the Invisible: Documenting and Interpreting China’s Cultural Presence in Uzbekistan (Part 2) 22 Nov 2020 Alexey Ulko Setting himself the task of “researching ‘the politics and aesthetics of the visual representation of China-Uzbek relations’…” Alex Ulko continues to reflect on the “complexity and contradictions” permeating the relationship between China and countries within Central Asia. This follows from Part 1 as another collection of photographs, thoughts and observations – his ongoing inquiry which seeks to piece together a “disjointed and fragmented” picture of the lines running from China through and around Uzbekistan. B Peter Frankopan writes in his excellent, but somewhat sketchy, book The New Silk Roads (2018): “talking about improving connections is one thing; funding them is quite another.” It is a fair point to make as many previous ideas foreseeing the Great Silk Road’s revival, in one way or another, were based mostly on wishful thinking rather than on pragmatic strategies. My major experience dealing with one of such concepts was obtained while working for the International Institute for Central Asian Studies, established in Samarkand in 1995 as a result of UNESCO’s Silk Roads Project: Integral Studies of the Silk Roads, the Roads of Dialogue 1988-1997 . Described by Federico Mayor, the UNESCO Director-General at the time, as “a bold and ambitious venture set to reopen doors to the past thus shedding new light on the present”, the project was very much a product of its time. As the Cold War drew to a close and the Berlin Wall came down, many Central Asian scholars and politicians alike embraced a romantic, meta-modernist vision of the region’s future reunited with its glorious past. The Great Silk Road was seen as an essentialist template that had united people from China to Europe once, and so could be made to work again – of course, in a new geopolitical context. It promised to put Central Asia back to where it once apparently belonged: in the very centre of the intercontinental dialogue. The leaders of Uzbekistan were particularly keen to play the key role in this process. If Central Asia was the heart and soul of the world and the Great Silk Road its backbone, then Uzbekistan was its heart. Samarkand was, of course, the iconic Silk Road city and it made perfect sense to make it the home of a new institution that would symbolise the new-found zest for transcultural and transboundary cooperation in the region. IICAS Member States (from the internet) The IICAS was founded by ten member states with a mission to bring Central Asian historical and cultural issues to the international community’s attention. It was supposed to become an international academic hub, strengthening collaboration between local scholars and their foreign colleagues through a multidisciplinary study of the region. However, the vision of a prosperous, transparent and dynamic Central Asia never quite materialised. Central Asian states could never find a solid common background, and for over twenty years Uzbekistan mounted itself on a perch of political self-isolation, quarrelling with all its neighbours and being very much part of the problem, not the solution. Although the Silk Roads’ dream still continues, its implementation now almost entirely depends on China and Chinese capital as there are few volunteers who are ready to invest in the region. Even China can be quite choosy. It stopped paying its agreed fee to support the IICAS after several short years without any explanation. Ostensibly, this duty was transferred to a poorer government academic body. Most likely, the Chinese authorities simply felt that an open multicultural institution supporting a range of international projects along the Great Silk Road did not quite meet the objectives of the Chinese cultural and political strategy within the region. *** The Damansky Island Battle (Alex Ulko) Lei Feng, the Chinese national hero by Shen Jingdong (from the internet) One of my first conscious memories of China was the Chinese military threat. Of course, in the Soviet days no reliable information about it was available, but the public awareness of the Damansky Island conflict was there – albeit very vague and almost entirely based on rumours. The boys in class shared “confidential” information about eighteen infantry lines, rolling in waves on our defensive positions and being wiped out one by one by our secret weapon. Some said it was laser guns, others suggested generators of infrared rays were involved, but nobody could say which year it was. It seemed very recent at the time, but only much later did I learn that the armed conflict had taken place just a couple of days after I was born, in March 1969. The small Damansky Island in the Ussuri River was finally yielded to China in 1991 and is now known as Zhenbao Island (珍寶島). The commander of the Russian forces killed in action was a colonel Leonov, with an unusual first name: Demokrat. We know little about him, apart from the fact that he was born to a border guard officer in Baku in 1926, when the world Communist revolution still seemed so near. *** HUAWEI advert on the road from the Tashkent airport (Alex Ulko) In the first weeks of autumn 2020, as the heat of summer gave way to cooler weather, European states further restricted Huawei’s role in the construction of their communication networks. More and more countries became convinced that the Chinese company was a security threat. Their mainstream media outlets frequently mentioned that Chinese citizens were required by law to help their country gather intelligence where they could, and the US urged the EU to ban Chinese technology from its future communication networks. Keith Krach, the US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs said that “there is really no future with Huawei.” While the UK has already officially banned Huawei, it looks like Germany will probably suffocate the company’s operations with bureaucracy. The result will be the same, say European experts, but apparently not in Uzbekistan. The first thing visitors see on their way from the Tashkent International Airport to the city centre is a huge HUAWEI logo. It has replaced the old Soviet neon slogan “Tashkent is the City of Peace and Friendship”. A telling development, indeed. *** Wang Tong hotel in Tashkent (Alex Ulko) Uzbeks and the Chinese tend to see the world as two distinct groups of people: their own family, relatives, neighbours and friends (their circle of relationships) on one side of an imaginary fence, with everybody else on the other. These cultures identify a much stronger distinction between Us and Them than most European cultures. There are several important distinctions, as far as I can see. Firstly, although Uzbeks make up the majority in Uzbekistan, they are continuously exposed to other cultures, e.g. Russian, as they live along with representatives of these cultures (especially in cities). Uzbek culture is a classical hybrid, while the Chinese one seems much more defined. Many Uzbeks speak some other languages – Russian, Tajik, Kazakh or even English, and when they travel to a neighbouring country or to Russia, they do not feel intensely culturally isolated. In other words, they are quite used to being the colonial Other in Russia, and feel comfortable with guests, visitors or local non-Uzbeks in Uzbekistan. On the contrary, the Chinese are perceived by many other nations as a huge homogenous group and in many ways, they behave like this. Outside of China, their “In” group becomes abruptly and threateningly small, and it is ethnically determined. Both cultures, Chinese and Uzbek, are particularist. In other words, they value relationships more than the rules, and focus on the exceptional nature of present circumstances. Interestingly, the research conducted by Fons Trompenaars suggests that Russian culture is also particularist, even more so than Chinese (see Riding the Waves of Culture , 1993). This, of course, is relative. Many people in Uzbekistan lament that the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent independence brought about more corruption and deregulated chaos than what was thought permissible during the Soviet rule. Although this anecdotal evidence proves nothing, it at least tells us something about the perception of the Soviet, Russia-dominated culture vs. Uzbek which is seen by many as much more relationship-driven. It would also be interesting to see what will happen if, in the future, Chinese culture eventually replaces Russian in Central Asia. *** “Today, if people in Eurasia were all fans of Chinese pop music or television dramas, or had a more positive image of China, it might be easier for their governments to partner with Beijing on “win-win” initiatives like the BRI,” wrote a Chinese journalist George Gao (not to be confused with George Fu Gao, a prominent virologist and immunologist). Nikita Makarenko, one of the top Russian-language bloggers in Uzbekistan, rejected the very possibility of this on his Facebook page, saying “China can become as economically strong as it wants. But it will never seriously control the minds and hearts of people on the planet.” In his opinion, China does not produce an attractive and sought-after modern culture and as the result, nobody outside the country really listens to modern Chinese music or watches Chinese cinema. “You go to watch Nolan’s films and listen to Lady Gaga,” says Makarenko. Left: Cheap Chinese everyday products (Umida Akhmedova)Right: Chinese wholesale shop (Elina Klimova) This may sound like another bout of Sinophobia based on racial prejudice but the popularity of the more distant and even more esoteric Japanese popular culture – from karate to manga, Kurosawa to yakitori suggests otherwise. One of the commentators noticed, “Japanese people are far more likely to respect my privacy and not try to strike up a random conversation with me. I often find that it’s difficult to just be left alone in China, which is annoying.” However, talking to several Uzbeks now living in China, I have heard some praises of its social culture. Some Uzbeks commented that the Chinese are quite good at creating an atmosphere of informal camaraderie between people, and that they can be outspoken and direct in discussion. One Uzbek girl who had spent several years teaching English in a Chinese school said, “Chinese girls have more opportunities than ever before in education and work, and they always seem to have goals and ambitions of their own, not like back home.” The quarantine in China (Zarina Anvar) Yet Makarenko remained unconvinced. “No one in the world wants to be like [the] Chinese. No one in their right mind wears a Beijing logo on their cap and dreams of emigrating to the fabulous Guangzhou.” His conclusion is simple. “In an authoritarian state, the production of a topical and globally modern cultural product is simply impossible. A lily will not grow in the desert, only a cactus and a thorn.” Tell that to Ai Weiwei, I thought. Or Yuk Hui. *** Thinking further about the BRI and the relations between China and Uzbekistan, I remembered Vanessa Page writing about China, “it is home to rampant corruption. The national government is actively trying to stamp it out in an effort to make the country more business-friendly for westerners and to avoid the economic and business inefficiencies that come from corruption.” Uzbekistan is facing very similar problems and if there has been a name evoked every time corruption in the country is mentioned, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of independent Singapore. His popularity with Uzbek neoliberals is explained by his image of “a man with an iron hand,” leading his country to prosperity in an Asian, rather than a democratic European, fashion. Here, a top-down Soviet approach gets mixed with patriarchal power patterns attributed to Asia. Some influencers seriously suggest that Uzbekistan should adopt “a Singaporean model” unconcerned by the huge geopolitical difference between one of the world’s busiest cargo ports and a double landlocked country in “the lost heart of Asia,” as Colin Thubron had it. Chinese and Uzbek flags (Umida Akhmedova) Guanxi (benefits gained from social connections) (Alex Ulko) Corruption is not the only problem that China shares with Uzbekistan. There are obvious cracks in both countries’ economies. There is the problem of underemployment and inflation. Government spending is a key driver of growth in China and in Uzbekistan, and it has led to indiscriminate construction in the recent years. China has struggled to find buyers for properties in its ghost cities. Some large-scale city development projects in Uzbekistan have already stalled. The vision of urbanism that has become the trademark of Chinese “progress” (whatever that means in real terms) has turned into a form of cargo cult in Uzbekistan – an imitation without any clear objective. Commenting on the poor quality of the newly built high-rise building in the centre of Tashkent, some people say, “at least these won’t stay here long.” What a consolation! *** The famous Russian rock musician, Boris Grebenshchikov, a renowned connoisseur of Taoism, wrote the following joke and shared it on Facebook: “One day Lao Tzu was driving a black buffalo and violated the traffic rules. A traffic cop approached him and asked to see his driving license. Lao Tzu said: – When water flows down, it does nothing, because flowing down is its natural property. Such are the properties of a true person: they do not improve, but things follow them. The sky itself is high. The earth itself is solid. The Moon and the Sun are light in themselves. What can they improve? How can a person riding a buffalo have a license? The cop did not know whether to laugh or to cry.” Chinese traffic police signs (from the internet) In 2007, Chinese city traffic police officers had an average life expectancy of 43 years. Nearly every traffic police officer in large cities had respiratory infections caused by polluted air. Stress, traffic noise and the time they had to stand in the sun also exacerbated their grave health conditions. I do not know if their life has become better over the last 13 years, but I am sure that even without the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains rather grim. Things do not change that fast. *** An important characteristic of the BRI framework has been noticed by Roman Vakulchuk and Indra Overland, who saw that the Chinese strategists had decided to tackle the internal lack of cohesion within the Central Asian region by using a bilateral approach in China’s relations with Central Asian governments in the 21st century. They write: “The Chinese have acted patiently and pragmatically, and over time have managed to build working relations with each of the five countries, including Turkmenistan, where the construction of the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline can be viewed as a major Chinese success story in a country where both Russia and the United States have struggled to maintain a foothold.” However, these bilateral relations can be described as skewed, at best. A substantial part of the Chinese investments into Central Asia forever remains within the Chinese infrastructure as a loan given by a Chinese bank to a local government, or when project is used to pay the Chinese company that had been contracted to execute the project. The company, of course, uses Chinese equipment and Chinese workers to do almost all the work. The most spectacular illustrations of this are the roads built in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as the Kamchik Railway Tunnel in Uzbekistan linking the Ferghana Valley with the rest of the country across the mountains. Chinese construction equipment (Elina Klimova) Despite the fact that BRI is a huge regional project, it is obvious that in the short and medium term, the collaboration between China and Central Asian states will be based primarily on bilateral relations. That was what happened in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and in a different form, is now happening in Uzbekistan. In summer 2020, I had to open my Visa card with an Uzbek bank and tellingly chose the one called the Ipak Yuli Bank (the Silk Road Bank). I was quite surprised to receive a free UnionPay card as a bonus. Interested, I went online to check the benefits and potential issues with the card and found the following review: “After the annexation of the Crimea, the United States and other Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia, which has led to disruptions in service to holders of Visa and MasterCard cards issued by some Russian banks. Chinese UnionPay cards, which on the one hand have become common throughout the world, on the other hand, cannot have their use limited by US authorities. So for those who have suffered from the sanctions or are afraid of such a prospect, the CUP cards are the most suitable.” If there is a book that can comprehensively explain the attractiveness of such exciting options to Central Asians, it’s not going to be Frankopan’s New Silk Roads, but rather Dictators without Borders by Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw. a screenshot of a section dedicated to Uzbek-China relations from Podrobno.uz (from the internet) Meanwhile in Uzbekistan, the once invisible Chinese presence is becoming more and more articulate. A popular web news outlet podrobno.uz/ has a special section dedicated solely to the relations between Uzbekistan and China, aptly called: Keys to the Future . The section contains what is known as “sponsored content” with texts redolent of the long forgotten Soviet style – unashamedly banal and bombastic at the same time. One article describing a cultural festival organised by the Chinese company CNODC, informs its readers that “the Chinese people call on the peoples of the whole world to jointly create a global community of shared destiny. And many countries have already extended their hands of friendship and cooperation in return. We must act together, share our cultures and knowledge, have common good goals and move forward, creating a bright and wonderful future for our descendants. After all, we are all children of the same planet.” Aren’t we just? Atlas gown, two books and two chopsticks (Alex Ulko) Alexey Ulko , born in Samarkand (Uzbekistan) in 1969. Previous Next

Mentors Mentors of WCSCD program so far included: Dorothea von Hantelmann (Bard College, Berlin); Antariksa (co-founding member of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Yogyakarta, Indonesia); the Flash Art Magazine editorial team (Flash Art is a bimonthly magazine focused on contemporary art, based in Milan); Elena Filipović (director of Kunsthalle Basel);Tara McDowell (director of curatorial practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia); Maria Lind (director of Tensta konsthall, Stockholm); Matt Packer (director of EVA International); Hou Hanru (artistic director of MAXXI Rome, Italy); and What, How & for Whom (a curatorial collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb, Croatia), Branislav Dimitrijevic ( art historian based in Belgrade), Ares Shporta ( Lumbardhi Foundation, Kosovo), Zdenka Badovinac ( Moderna Galeria Ljubljana), Nikita Yingqian Cai ( Times Museum, Guang Zhou), Charles Esche ( Van Abbe Museum), Sinisa Ilic (artist based in Belgrade), Ekaterina Degot (Director and Chief Curator of steirischer herbst), Lisa Rosendahl (Associate Professor of Exhibition Studies at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and Curator of GIBCA—the Gothenburg biennial in 2019 & 2021), Luca Lo Pinto (director of MACRO in Rome), Suzana Milevska (curator and a visual culture theorist), Lejla Hodzic (cultural worker) , Xiang Zairong ( scholar), Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (independent curator, editor and writer), and ruangrupa ( artistic directors of Documenta 15), Lejla Hodzic ( art practitioner, Sarajevo), Jelica Jovanovic ( architect), Skart Collective ( Belgrade), Katalin Szekely ( OFF Biennale, Budapest), Massimilliano Mollona ( Institute for Radical Immagination), Manuel Borja Villel ( Museo National Renia Sofia), Amelie Aranguren ( INLAND), Aslihan Demirtas ( architect). < How to Apply Educational Program Events >