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< Back Artists as Gardeners Bishkek 16 Apr 2020 Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev The quarantine for coronavirus has forced everybody to stay within their home. For many reasons, we cannot say that this situation has completely changed our lifestyle. It just allows us to put on ice some of our projects and slow down everything we usually do. A combination of artistic activity with gardening allows us to be in isolation for a long time and connect with our friends, students and colleagues online. Besides, spring is a hot season for a gardener. We moved to a village in a suburb of Bishkek city more than 20 years ago. We dreamed of having our own land and studio and it was a chance to buy a small house for quite an affordable price. At that time, we did not know that most of the territory we bought used to be on a riverside. The Soviet government decided to change one of the riverbeds of Ala Archa river in the 1970s, dry it, fill it with some construction waste and flatten the land. Later we learned that our neighboors called our place “The House on a Rubbish Dump.” We realised this when we began to cultivate the land in order to plant some trees. Every time we excavated the ground we found either concrete details or broken bricks and other waste. During the last 20 years we transformed this place step-by-step by putting down a dozen trucks of soil, planting a garden and organizingirrigation. We extended the house by building a studio, and all this process of building and garderning gave us many reasons to think about our relations to Nature. This has affected many of our artistic and curatorial projects that we have been doing in recent years, from shooting videos at Bishkek city dump, curating a public art festival at the botanical gardens, building an eco-house, following the principles of permaculture, water conservation, waste separation and recycling. This activity has allowed us to become familiar with so many urban activists, architects and eco farmers, to help our students to realize their works in two editions of Trash Festival and participate in their actions against city pollution. Being in quarantine is not complete isolation for us due to constant online connection with the local and world news for updates on coronavirus. The State of Emergency in Kyrgyzstan has put the spotlight on many problems in our country, such as social inequality, the poor condition of hospitals, religious fanaticism and corruption within the government. At the same time, it is obvious that, since the lockdown, air in Bishkek city has become much cleaner and we can also see a decrease in air pollution at a world-level. It is quite ironic that air for citizens could be cleaner only without them. We are the second urban generation in Kyrgyzstan – our parents came from the countryside to study at the university and then settled in Bishkek. Most of our school holidays we spent in the highland countryside in a house of our grannies and it gave us some good memories, energy, and probably nostalgia about apple gardens and green grass in a courtyard. Today, gardening for us is more than just planting and harvesting. It is something very close to artistic activity. It is rather a philosophy than a farming. Leaving all turbulences behind the fence, the gardener is aware that whatever he does improves this life and there are no alternatives for the future, only building a Garden. Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev are artists and curators from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Previous Next

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities Practices of Care: On Rehumanization and Curating | WCSCD 2020/21 Annual Lecture Series The curatorial program What Could/Should Curating Do 2020 is proud to continue in 2020 with public program through lecture series The fifth talk in the 2020/21 series is titled: “Practices of Care: On Rehumanization and Curating” By Natasa Petresin-Bachelez Date: January 12, 2020 Time: 12:00 pm Belgrade/ 10:00 pm Melbourne/ 07:00 pm Shanghai/ 6:00 am New York Venue: zoom link Meeting ID: 985 237 3109 Live stream/Facebook link Installation of Sensing Salon, part of the exhibition Not Fully Human, Not Human at All, Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2020, photo Natasa Petresin-Bachelez Natasa Petresin-Bachelez will speak about two of her recent curatorial projects, “Not Fully Human, Not Human at All” (KADIST and Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2020, co-curated with Bettina Steinbrügge) and the Initiative of Practices and Visions of Radical Care that she co-founded with Elena Sorokina in spring 2020. Through them she will trace the questions of (in)compatibility of curatorial and institutional methods with the produced content, and talk about her understanding of the concept of interdependence. photo by Ivana Kalvacheva, jewellery artist ismail Afghan About Speaker Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an independent curator, editor and writer, she lives and works in Paris. Among the projects and exhibitions she curated are: Contour Biennale 9: Coltan as Cotton (Mechelen, 2019), Defiant Muses. Delphine Seyrig and Feminist Video Collectives in France in 1970s-1980s at the Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid and museum LaM, Lille (with Giovanna Zapperi, 2019), Let’s Talk about the Weather. Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis at the Sursock Museum in Beirut (with Nora Razian, 2016), Resilience. Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia at Museum of Contemporary Art (Ljubljana, 2013), and in France Becoming Earthlings. Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge #18 at Musée de l’Homme (with Alexander Klose, Council and Mobile Academy, 2015), Tales of Empathy at Jeu de Paume (2014), The Promises of the Past at the Centre Pompidou (with Christine Macel and Joanna Mytkowska, 2010), Société anonyme at Le Plateau/FRAC Ile-de-France (with Thomas Boutoux and François Piron, 2007). Between 2010 and 2012, she was co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and co-founder of the European network of small-scale art institutions Cluster. She is a co-organizer and co-founder of the seminar Something You Should Know at EHESS, Paris (with Elisabeth Lebovici and Patricia Falguières), and a member of the research group Travelling Féministe, at Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, Paris. She is the chief editor of the publishing platform Versopolis Review, between 2014 and 2017 she was the chief editor of L’Internationale Online, the publishing platform of L’Internationale – the confederation of cultural institutions, and between 2012 and 2014 she was the chief editor of the Manifesta Journal. She contributed to various publications and held lectures and organized seminars in which she presents her ongoing research into situated curatorial practices, empathy and transnational feminism, slow institutions, performative practices in the former Eastern Europe, and engaged artistic practices in the era of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. In the scholar year 2019-2020 she teaches at the Sint Lucas School of Arts, Antwerpen. WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD) WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD) was initiated and funded in 2018 in Belgrade as an educational platform around notions of curatorial. From 2020 WCSCD started to initiate its own curatorial inquiries and projects that should unpack above -mentioned complexities keeping educational component as a core to the WCSCD. The WCSCD curatorial program and series of public lectures have been initiated and organized by Biljana Ciric. WCSCD 2020/2021 public program series has been done in collaboration with Division of Arts and Humanities, Duke Kunshan University and they co-stream all public lectures. Strategic media collaboration is done with Seecult and they will co-host all public lecture series. Project Partners Media Partner For more information about the program, please refer to www.wcscd.com Project contacts: what.could.curating.do@gmail.com Follow us: FB: @whatcscdo Instagram: @whatcouldshouldcuratingdo < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

< Back Belgrade Calling Coronavirus entry 25 Apr 2020 Katarina Kostandinović DIARY ENTRY no1. A few weeks ago, right after the WHO has announced the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, I found myself scrolling through the internet in search of some news explaining what that means. Since the beginning of the 21 st century there’s been two pandemics, the first one was the 2009 flu pandemic or the so-called swine flu, and the second one is the current coronavirus pandemic. Also since the beginning of the new century there’s been numerous deadly epidemics worldwide – Ebola, SARS (another zoonotic disease caused by the SARS coronavirus), just to name two. I cannot recall the situation in Serbia during the 2009 pandemic, and probably the situation then (even though just a decade ago) was a lot different… DIARY ENTRY no2. The situation with the coronavirus in Belgrade began its outbreak in the second week of March, almost a few weeks after the scandalous press conference of the Crisis Management arm of the Government of the Republic of Serbia and medical experts. While the epidemic was on the rise in Italy, Serbian government officials and experts made jokes about the “funniest” virus in human history, and that the Serbian people had endured so much suffering and distress over the past three decades that such a virus would be nothing to “us”. More than a month has passed since the conference, the number of people infected in Serbia is increasing day by day, intercity and inner-city public transportation has been stopped, a curfew has been introduced in all cities from 5pm to 5am during weekdays, and a total lockdown during weekends. News reports say that this is the biggest movement restriction since World War II. DIARY ENTRY no3. Like most people in the world I now work from home, programs in public and private institutions across Serbia are suspended until further notice, only markets and shops operate. Every day is the same, I wake up, scroll through the news online that contain corona headlines, foreign, domestic news, everyone reports the same, and statistics change day by day. I don’t have a TV, so I filter sources and information as much as possible. We are forced to minimize our daily habits and even abolish them, but somehow the human psyche is resilient and wants to test whether things will really “explode”, waiting and doing things the way we are used to. The flow of time is strange, my days have never passed faster, and leisure and working time blend into one another. The very thought of future projects becomes a hazy projection, and the question that logically arises is: does it matter at this point? All of a sudden everything becomes bizarre, like a commercial for space travel. I’m thinking the virus could mutate and turn some into feverish zombies who cough and sneeze at people, and these people immediately turn into them and continue to spread the virus. Something between the Jim Jarmusch movie “ The Dead Don’t Die ” and British apocalypse comedy “ Shaun of the Dead ”. That seems like a good idea for a comic book in the graphic form of “ The End of The Fucking World ”. DIARY ENTRY no4. Overwhelmed and frustrated. Don’t make a podcast – I keep telling myself. Spend less time on Instagram, post less on Instagram. I am so surrounded by all this social media content that it just pressures me to produce something similar. But then I realize how stupid that sounds, and continue scrolling. Then again, in what other situation would I say,“let’s see which opera is streaming now on Vimeo?” By now, a large number of institutions and organizations have cancelled and/or rescheduled their programmes, coming up with meaningful ways to re-design them and finding innovative ways of communication and presentation. But then the logical question arises: what after? Is all this content temporary? The internet is already a space of overproduction, it is already becoming overwhelmed with loads of information, virtual tours, podcasts and other content. Social media platforms are the perfect virtual meeting places, so it is only natural that as museums and galleries are closing their doors they are focusing on their online accounts. Many are sharing videos, live streams and online events etc. The movement and circulation of images and words is quite literally what we all do. I think it’s important to look at online programs not as a space to memorialize the exhibitions that were, or the exhibitions that could have been, but as its own medium – some installation shots, a few photos collected together, or a virtual tour just isn’t enough. Many articles also appear to suggest the acceptance of this new pace, us slowing down in this state of uncertainty, staying at home to rethink our future plans, if any. Being surrounded by such overwhelming digital content makes me think about different ways of rethinking accessibility, archiving, and documentation of the “site specific” content. DIARY ENTRY no5. It seems that slowing down and accepting this new pace isn’t beneficial for everyone, like some lifestyle blogs are suggesting. Due to COVID-19 we are also facing the biggest economic crisis since 2008. Many Serbian people, gastarbeiters, migrant workers, freelancers that are living abroad are being faced (or threatened) with job losses and forced to return to Serbia. Public funds for culture in Serbia are definitely going to be reduced even though for years now the sum has been very modest, except of some special (state) cultural projects. Many independent spaces, freelance curators and independent artists are, even more than before, very much endangered. Just before the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe it came to my attention that many contracts made with public institutions that facilitate exhibitions and discursive programmes don’t have provisions concerning change of circumstances of the contract in the case of “higher power” (as it literally translates from Serbian – “viša sila”). Many contracts between institutions and independent workers are made in a way that exclusively protects the institution where the event takes place, and all responsibility rests entirely with the other party. For example, I was invited by two artists to curate their exhibition in one public institution in Belgrade scheduled to open in mid-March. Having realized the severity of the situation, the number of infected people increasing, Italy “shutting down”, we urged the institution to postpone the exhibition, explaining that all public institutions would soon cancel their programmes and declare a State of Emergency. Representatives of that institution threatened us with a lawsuit, however luckily we succeeded to cancel the exhibition two days before the opening, and without any legal consequences. DIARY ENTRY no6. I found myself google searching for photos regarding environmental changes caused by major industries shutting down, banned tourism and social distancing. There are many images of clearer water in Venice canals, “clear” sky over China and Europe, wildlife walking the streets of UK. There is also a sense of immense solidarity among people, helping endangered groups during the pandemic, sharing and delivering food and other supplies. I then scroll through some conspiracy theories and fake news (to humor myself) – most interesting are those about 5G network, and Dean Koontz’s novel “Eyes of Darkness”, among others. And there are many google searches about those who seek to benefit out of the situation, and these are mainly politicians. The State of Emergency in a way blurs some priorities in the time of movement restrictions and raises alarms about how human rights are being balanced against the risks posed by COVID-19. It seems like a flashback from a recent history; something is rotten in the state of Serbia.The most dramatic example in Europe so far has been Hungary, where Prime Minister Orban used his Fidesz Party’s parliamentary majority late last month to push through legislation that allows him to rule by decree for an indefinite period of time. Though his government says the measures are necessary to protect lives, there are worries that Hungary, a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has become an effective dictatorship [ 1] . Similar accusations are being made about the Serbian President, who shut down the country’s parliament as part of an open-ended State of Emergency he declared on March 15. The army has since been deployed to parts of the country, a 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew is in effect and people older than 65 have been banned from leaving their homes. And a recent public debate about the Government’s decision on information duringthe coronavirus pandemic, which prohibits crisis staff of municipalities and cities from giving information to the local media and the public regarding public health, just proves these suspicions right. Luckily the decision will not come into effect, due to many protests coming from the EU, but it seems that it was definitely motivated by the case of the journalist from Novi Sad being detained by the Serbian police after writing a critical text on the handling of the coronavirus epidemic. [ 2] (Not a conclusion) It seems that all we can do is wait and hope for the best. The urgent is highly likely to crowd out the important. We can just speculate the options for a world after the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic is a new kind of crisis, one that involves testing the behaviors and beliefs of billions of people, and that has public health, economic, political, social, psychological and cultural dimensions. Katarina Kostandinović is an art historian and curator based in Belgrade, Serbia. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/hungary-jail-for-coronavirus-misinformation-viktor-orban [2] https://www.rferl.org/a/serbian-journalist-detained-questioned-over-critical-coronavirus-article/30525582.html Previous Next

< Back What happens after the contactless art world? Guangzhou 14 Apr 2020 Nikita Yingqian Cai When Covid-19 crosses physical borders with exponential scale and speed, its secondary catastrophes also provoke doomsday imagination from every sector of society. One ironic image about the art world circulating on social media is a meme of two screen shots from Titanic , in which the sinking boat symbolizes “The world in 2020”, while the quartet playing on the deck stands for the “Art institutions and galleries generating online content”. The metaphor is blunt and alarming：our security net and social identification won’t stand alone in the bleak economic prospect of the sinking world, so are we producing content just for the sense of belonging? Will we end up being the only audience of this content? Titanic meme After Art Basel launched the online viewing room on March 20 as compensation for its cancelling of the fair in Hong Kong, commercial galleries fell over one another to explore the contactless art market as a therapy for the pandemic shock. It will probably take another crisis for economists to analyze data, compare behavioral patterns, and make predictions of the online sales profitability, but institutions that are less profit-oriented are by no means immune to the competition of attention that has been created by global social distancing. Alongside the outburst of open resource archives and publications, online screenings and showrooms, podcasts, live streaming and Zoom conferences quickly take over as platforms for art events. M Woods, a private art museum in Beijing, set up a virtual gallery inside the Nintendo game Animal Crossing to add value to its image as internet influencer. The game allows people to pay mortgages, build homes with furniture and objects, and socialize with animal neighbors according to their own image and imagination, but all the resources for this dreamlike island have to be extracted from somewhere offshore. The image of a cute little girl meditating on a bench surrounded by the wallpaper of Andy Warhol’s Cow (1966) is a perfect metaphor for escapism. Such 4.0 version of Cao Fei’s RMB City (2007-2011) is nonetheless novel but its simulation of the neo-liberal lifestyle is hard to ignore. Since the outbreak in Wuhan in January, new forms of social networks and collaborations have emerged and concrete solidarity is being formed across different social sectors in China, yet our contemporary art world is busy promoting the commodified experience of art. M Woods Instagram Two days ago, I stumbled upon an online vernissage on e-flux, presented by the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design and titled Weird Sensation Feels Good. An Exhibition About ASMR (“Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”). According to the statement, “ASMR injects the Internet with softness, kindness and empathy. As a form of digital intimacy, it offers comfort on demand, standing against the feeling of isolation that constant connectivity can deceptively breed. Anecdotally, ASMR is being used as a form of self-medication against the effects of loneliness, insomnia, stress, and anxiety. This is a cue to its success, and to its transcendental appeal”. [1] Conversely, the offline world is injected with hardness and struggles, self-medication is not going to protect people from getting sick or losing jobs. Less than a month after the containment policy went into effect in New York, the Museum of Modern Art terminated contracts with all its freelance educators in early April. MoMA represents one example of the museum industry among many other service industries that have sacked its part-time staff or furloughed its full-time employees quickly after the pandemic hit hard. Compared with small businesses such as restaurants, most museums’ operational budgets had been approved in 2019, and big institutions like MoMA would have planned out its fiscal structure, including the percentage of public funding, private patronage and ticket revenue for at least three years into the future. Before the closing of borders and museums, blockbuster exhibitions sat at the core of the art world’s show business, balancing the interests of trustees and the scale of production and demand. MoMA is one of the wealthiest museums in the world, so how come a cultural entity that embraces speculative narratives and future imaginations gives up so quickly in response to temporary uncertainties? Are we losing faith in reclaiming our audience after the pandemic? Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, stated in an open letter that some of their staff have been sick but all of them will be able to keep their jobs “thanks in part to Spain’s governmental assistance program”. He also addressed the necessity of a paradigm shift, “Eventually, museums will reopen, but will people be afraid of being close to one another? Will we be able to continue developing large exhibitions that are anti-ecological? Maybe blockbuster exhibitions are over. Maybe we should think more about process and research.” [2] Recalling a postwar Marshall plan or a re-emphasis on process and research is certainly not a paradigm shift. We have to go deeper to ask: What kind of paradigm are we talking about? Has the pandemic revealed the problematics of the diffusionist museum model driven by Euro-American centralism and modernism? The Museum of Modern Art as a canon of large-scale institution was born in the U.S. context and charged with historical contingency. When Alfred Barr organized Cubism and Abstract Art at 11 West 53rd Street in New York, he had no idea that the diagram he presented and the symbolic construct of abstract art would lay ground for a global chronology of modernism which shaped artists’ learning experiences and their occupational aspirations, historical arguments and museology outside of the Western centers in the postwar years. The evolutionary periodization and the colonial terms of “Near-Eastern Art” and “Negro Sculpture” have been challenged and eventually abandoned, but the network of the main characters remains (artists, art historians, curators, museum directors and trustees etc.) and it maps out a division of labor, identity and resource which still functions in our contemporary art world. What is invisible in Barr’s modern art supply chain is the end of demand, which we call “audience” nowadays. The American economy had not recovered from the Great Depression when Barr’s exhibition opened in 1936, and it took a sharp downturn in mid-1937 which lasted for another 18 months. It is hard to imagine Cubism and Abstract Art was orchestrated for ordinary Americans who were still suffering from unemployment at that time, and yet the exhibition gained substantial support from MoMA’s trustees to secure the artworks through U.S. Customs and from other private foundations. Barr’s essay in the catalog highlighted the “impulse of abstraction” and its dialectic; “it is based upon the assumption that a work of art, a painting for example, is worth looking at primarily because it presents a composition or organization of color, line, light and shape.” [3] Such zeitgeist needs to be accommodated in the idealized, climate-controlled white cube, which becomes the most important paradigmatic residual of MoMA. Even in a time of crisis, museums can still shut the discorded tones of the economical-disadvantaged and messiness of reality outside, and provide sanctuary for autonomous art objects and meditation. Museum of American Art in Berlin, installation shots at Times Museum in the collection display of Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana There has been a lot of comparison between the stock market crashes in February and March this year and the Wall Street collapse in 1929 that triggered the decade-long Great Depression. But the postwar trauma has given European countries more reasons to activate their social democratic policies，such as the German federal government’s sweeping aid package of €50 billion for the country’s creative and cultural sectors. The Chinese media and artist community voluntarily picked up the positive messages rather than the depressing ones in such a difficult time. Artist friends who live in Germany posted messages on wechat about their application for the subsidies, and some of them had already received the money. I’m genuinely happy that art sector and artist’s social values can be recognized and sustained in the European context, but a conversation between myself and Qiao, our curatorial assistant，unpacked my doubts. Qiao shares an apartment with a couple of friends who are educated young professionals. They have been intrigued by Qiao’s enthusiasm and have visited some of Times Museum’s exhibitions. Qiao said that her friends couldn’t understand why the arts need to be subsidized, and why a government like Germany is giving artists money. I tried to structure my thoughts and present my arguments around the emergence of the bourgeoisie museum after the French Revolution, Tony Bennett’s “exhibitionary complex” informed by Foucault, the modernist ideology of “art for art’s sake” and the more recent socioeconomic concept of “precariat” proposed by Guy Standing… I soon realized that none of Qiao’s roommates would be satisfied with my explanation. Artists are precariats because “they live with the expectation and desire to move around, without an impulse for long-term, full-time employment in a single enterprise.” [4] They are cultural migrant workers competing in the global market, but the globalization that used to support their production has been put on hold. European countries with colonial history have been exporting their culture and artists for centuries and they know this business better than anyone else. Xiang Biao, a social anthropologist who has won awards for his survey on cross-bordered labor migration from Northeast China, argued for a different interpretation of “precariat”, “one very important background note about the precariat in the West is that they are the product of a large-scale reduction of the welfare state, as well as excessive marketization and liberalization. The loss of workers’ benefits has left these people feeling like they are in a precarious spot. So the Western precariat has developed movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and they have become an active political force. For China’s society people, their material life is better than before, and many are quite grateful to their country. From this point of view, they’re not like the precariat. That’s why when you talk to them about movements like Occupy, they don’t understand where all this anger is coming from.” Xiang emphasized the role of intermediaries which create demand and control the flow of migration, and went even further to claim that these laborers’ “contributions to China will increasingly be reflected in their role as consumers. In the future, the way in which they relate to society will not be mainly as laborers, but as consumers.” [5] After the Beijing Olympic Game in 2008, galleries, museums and art media in China have all contributed to creating a demand for contemporary art narrowly defined by market value. The inauguration of the West Bund Art & Design Fair in 2014 and the neo-liberal developmental policies of the Shanghai government also paved the way for unprecedented growth of blockbuster exhibitions which feature artists as celebrity producers of commodified visual experiences. The paradigm of MoMA and the ideology of modernism were stripped of their historical context and repackaged as a glossy new dream of immersive consumption. Museums, biennials and art fairs witnessed queues of young audiences even though the price of one entrance ticket has soared up to 150-250RMB. There is also a popular myth among potential museum founders that franchising museums and reproducing blockbusters are going to bring in substantial revenues. We are creating the bubble of contemporary art like Luckin Coffee selling its speculative financial statements to investors. China’s economic miracle in the past four decades has relied on demographic dividends boosted by the increasing share of the working-age population and more women entering the labor force. One does not need statistics to confirm such insight because museum audiences in China are mostly young and mostly girls. During the period of containment, people got used to contactless everything. Contactless payment has prevailed over cash for some time, contactless delivery prevents people from rushing to supermarkets and hoarding, contactless education keeps kids and parents occupied at home… It is not Confucianism or totalitarianism that have stopped Chinese people from going around, it is our easy adaption to contactless socializing. The modernist impulse of abstraction demonstrated by Alfred Barr in Cubism and Abstract Art has been transformed into a powerful, digitized abstraction of capitalism and consumerism. The question is whether the digital intermediary will lead our audience back to the museum after we all recover from the pandemic, or it will completely replace the temporal-spatial intimacy of relating to an artwork in a museum? One thing we have learnt from the ongoing crisis is the vulnerability of our existing structure of globalization. Individual stories, precarious voices and empirical knowledge can be filtered by ideological constructs and power relations. We are all in this and there is no exclusive position we can take as cultural makers. Identifying ourselves as precariats might smash the forming hierarchy of different social groups, and we have to recognize that labor division between artists (art professionals) and other professions, producers and consumers does not hold a historical legitimacy outside of the Euro-American context. The paradigm of museums and exhibition-making might not be able to accommodate the diverse experiences and document the socioeconomic transformations in the post-corona world. Replicating the model of the modern art museum, reproducing large exhibitions that are anti-ecological, or homogenizing user-consumer experiences of art will not introduce any shift. We have to walk on the ground, resist our impulse of abstraction, indigenize the process of art making and become our own intermediaries to configurate new contacts between people. Click to read Chinese version Nikita Yingqian Cai lives and works in Guangzhou, where she is currently Associate Director and Chief Curator at Guangdong Times Museum. [1] ArkDes presents a virtual vernissage, WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD | An exhibition about ASMR, April 7, 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/video/325072/arkdes-nbsp-presents-a-virtual-vernissage-weird-sensation-feels-good/ (accessed on April 11, 2020)[1] Manuel Borja-Villel, [2] Letter From Madrid: The Director of the Reina Sofia on What It Will Take for Museums to Rise Again—and What They Can Do in the Meantime, April 6, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/madrid-reina-sofia-director-1824210 [3] Cubism and Abstract Art, p. 13, April 1936, The Museum of Modern Art New York [4] Guy Standing, Defining the Precariat, A Class in the Making. April 19. 2013, https://www.eurozine.com/defining-the-precariat/ [5] Cai Yiwen, Q&A with Anthropologist Xiang Biao on Northeast China’s Overseas Migrants, March 19. 2020 http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005348/q%26a-with-anthropologist-xiang-biao-on-northeast-chinas-overseas-migrants Previous Next

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities Reimagining the museum | WCSCD 2020/21 Annual Lecture Series The curatorial program What Could/Should Curating Do 2020 is proud to continue in 2020 with public program through lecture series The first talk in the 2020 series is titled: Reimagining the museum By Luca Lo Pinto Date: November 10, 2020 Time: 12:00 pm Belgrade/10:00 pm Melbourne /6:00 am New York Venue: zoom invitation link (ID: 985 237 3109) Live stream/Facebook event link “The museum is a medium that should constantly be able to be questioned. It cannot be anymore intended as a space of mere contemplation but rather as a social space based on freedom of experimentation and on the desire to realise artists’ visions. In a historical moment in which the concept of museum and its identity are constantly challenged by social and economic changes as well as by the language of art itself, it’s essential to experiment with alternative models. In occasion of the talk, I would discuss the program I’m developing at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome where I’m turning the museum into an exhibition intended as a form and place of production. A container which becomes content – aiming to reduce the distance between the dichotomies of museum-actor and public-spectator”. Portrait by Giovanna Silva About Speaker Born in 1981, Luca Lo Pinto is the artistic director of MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. From 2014 till 2019 he worked as curator of Kunsthalle Wien. He is co-founder of the magazine and publishing house NERO. At Kunsthalle Wien he organized solo exhibitions of Nathalie du Pasquier, Camille Henrot, Gelatin&Liam Gillick, Olaf Nicolai, Pierre Bismuth, Babette Mangolte, Charlemagne Palestine and the group exhibitions Time is Thirsty; Publishing as an artistic toolbox: 1989-2017; More than just words; One, No One and One Hundred Thousand; Individual Stories and Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality. Other curatorial projects include Io, Luca Vitone (PAC, Milan),16th Art Quadriennale (Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome), Le Regole del Gioco (Achille Castiglioni Studio-Museum, Milan); Trapped in the closet (Carnegie Library/FRAC Champagne Ardenne, Reims), Antigrazioso (Palais de Tokyo, Paris); Luigi Ontani (H.C. Andersen Museum, Rome); D’après Giorgio (Giorgio de Chirico Foundation, Rome); Olaf Nicolai-Conversation Pieces (Mario Praz Museum, Rome). He has written for many catalogues and international magazines. He edited the book “Documenta 1955-2012. The endless story of two lovers” and artist books by Olaf Nicolai, Luigi Ontani, Emilio Prini, Alexandre Singh, Mario Garcia Torres and Mario Diacono. In 2014 he published a time capsule publication titled 2014. WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD) WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD) was initiated and funded in 2018 in Belgrade as an educational platform around notions of curatorial. From 2020 WCSCD started to initiate its own curatorial inquiries and projects that should unpack above -mentioned complexities keeping educational component as a core to the WCSCD. The WCSCD curatorial program and series of public lectures have been initiated and organized by Biljana Ciric. WCSCD 2020/2021 public program series has been done in collaboration with Division of Arts and Humanities, Duke Kunshan University and they co-stream all public lectures. Strategic media collaboration is done with Seecult and they will co-host all public lecture series. Project Partners Media Partner For more information about the program, please refer to www.wcscd.com Project contacts: what.could.curating.do@gmail.com Follow us: FB: @whatcscdo Instagram: @whatcouldshouldcuratingdo < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

< Back The Election Conundrum: Ethiopia’s Determination to hold the 6th National Election and its Ramifications 20 June 2021 Naol Befkadu The official NEBE logo of the 6th National Election with the hashtag “Via Election Only” It was Abraham Lincoln, the US president during the civil war, who famously said, “Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision.” However, Abraham Lincoln did not consider at least two things. One is that the case for Africa is different, and the other is that when a pandemic hits the world, it changes a lot of things. Ethiopia was not the only nation to postpone its election in 2020. In fact it is among 78 countries around the world that should have undertaken elections in 2020 but were forced to postpone due to the pandemic. The 6th Ethiopian national election was expected to be held on August 29, 2020, but due to the pandemic it was indefinitely postponed until further notice from the Ministry of Health regarding the course of the pandemic. In December 2020, the Ministry of Health announced that the election could take place with necessary COVID-19 related precautions. Hence, the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) planned for the polls to open on June 5th 2021. In early May the NEBE claimed that facilities were not ready for the election to take place on time, and rescheduled for June 21, 2021. There are many sides to the story of the election. Some believe that the election is a sham and should not take place while others adamantly support it. By now the situation in Ethiopia has been internationalized with so many spectators now accustomed to inserting their feet into it. The true picture of the country is yet to be unveiled to the international community who seem to be concerned with the recent situation in Ethiopia. Before I go deep into the opinions surrounding the 6th national election and the situation in the country in the general, it is necessary to have a sense of the background; hence, I will try to briefly paint the main events in the life of the country in the 20th and 21st centuries. Brief Background to the Story: From the Student Movement to the Qerroo Revolution Most scholars agree that the 20th century was the bloodiest and the most revolutionary century in Ethiopia’s history, politically speaking. The country endured an invasion by Italy (1930-35); a student movement that in 1974, brought down the monarchical government of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie Ⅰ, the longest reigning emperor of Ethiopia; the ‘Red Terror’ massacre that took the lives of hundreds of thousands; the civil war that resulted in the downfall of the Derg regime (1974-1991); and the devastating Ethiopian-Eritrean war of 1998-2000. While all those events are thought to have left a significant blueprint on the course of the country, there are three events that take the lion’s share in shaping political ideology, government structure and the economic model of the country. They are the 1970s student movement that took the voice of the peasants to the streets and to academia; the establishment of a communist government by a leading military junta (post-1974); and the downfall of the Derg regime by the joint force of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary and Democratic Front (EPRDF). Photo taken during a rally of Addis Ababa University students in the 1970s holding a banner that reads “Popular Government Must Be Established.” The 1970s student movement brought down the centuries-old Abyssinian monarchical system. The goal of the movement was twofold. Firstly, to bring an end to the feudalistic system that abused peasants all over the country. This feudalistic system had been in operation in the country for many centuries. With the dominant ruling Amhars tribe operating all over the country collecting unfair taxes from the peasants, the country was led by monarchs and autocrats who claim to have descended from the line of Judah. The student movement stood against such irrational notions. Secondly, beside the class struggle, the student movement also had another goal which was a national struggle. Although the country was made up of 87 nations, only the Abyssinians—comprising the Amharas and Tigres, who are historically the northern highland settlers—were dominant politically, culturally and economically. Hence, the student movement also brought to the fore the question of nations and nationalities and different ethnic and religious groups. A great example of these questions was the paper titled, “On the Questions of Nations and Nationalities of Ethiopia” by Wallelign Mekonnen, at the time a student at Haile Selassie I University. This paper is thought to be groundbreaking with its pioneering introduction of equality and recognition of nations and nationalities for different groups in the country. In light of this student-led movement in the 1970s, we assumed what the course of the country in the following decades would look like. Contrary to our expectation, the road to the fulfillment of the voices and cries of the 1970s generation (it is usually regarded as ‘The Then Generation’) was not smooth and easy. Many lives were taken and many are still sacrificing for their rights at the time of writing this article. Following the 1970s revolution, the military acted out and the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I, was overthrown in 1974. A transient military junta was created with Mengistu Hailemariam as president of the transitional government also known as “Derg”. Though the Derg was a military junta, it had a political manifesto and acted as a political entity. Most of the early 1970s elites also directly supported the regime. With a growing communist trend in the world, the military government of Ethiopia had been associated with communism and became one of the foremost advocates of communist ideology. Church and state were separated and the government officially declared itself atheist. This was in direct contradiction to the history of the country, mostly that of the Abyssinians who, for centuries had anointed Kings and Queens with an ordination of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The Derg, although initially supported by the 1970s elites, gradually lost credibility from the enlightened groups in the country when the military government became totalitarian and started attacking those who opposed its ideology. Mengistu Hailemariam, the president of the communist regime, became another dictator that Africa had to witness. However, Mengistu also faced many challenges. From the East, the Western Somalia Liberation Front (WSLF) under Siad Barre tried to invade Ethiopia’s Ogaden region. In the North, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) had been waging war to declare their freedom. And in the West, the Oromo Liberation Front had already started conquering land. While the Ogaden war of 1978-79 ended with Ethiopia claiming victory, the Northern war continued for more than a decade. The war in the North between the communist regime and the liberation forces took on the nature of a civil war. Many ethnic forces also joined the liberationist camps and jointly fought the communist regime. Eventually, the communist military junta also known as Derg, gave up and the EPRDF took power in 1991. The Derg military junta that ruled the country from 1974 to 1991 was overthrown by the joint forces of EPRDF, EPLF and OLF. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) dominated the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary and Democratic Front (EPRDF), which took power on the famous day of May 28, 1991. EPRDF expelled OLF of Oromia and eventually separated with the EPLF of Eritrea. EPRDF was then a party comprised of four big chapters, namely: the aforementioned Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), and the Southern People’s Democratic Movement (SPDM). The coming to power of EPRDF was another dramatic change that took place in 20th century Ethiopia, because EPRDF made several changes to the nature of the country. Regarding the economy, the country started following a free-market system in principle and a mixed system in practice. Following the revolution the country also changed its structure from unitary to a federal state that was divided into nine (now ten) self-administering regional states. This was in line with the demands of the student movement in the 1970s. Hence, many ethinc groups were recognized and their languages and cultures were appreciated under the EPRDF system. This was mainly made possible through the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution. The revolution handed the people a constitution that guaranteed human rights and religious freedom and promised free and fair elections. It was ratified in December 1995. It was the first of its kind in Ethiopia, which has had three constitutions. Of the three, the 1995 constitution was different with its liberal, democratic and inclusive nature. However, some still critiqued it saying the constitution gives undue attention to collective rights such as the rights of nations, nationalities and people, while focusing less on the individual rights of citizens. For an outsider it seems EPRDF had already answered the two big questions of the 1970s generation. Not so fast. In practice, there were many shortcomings of EPRDF’s system. The TPLF, the dominant party in the EPRDF, although representing the Tigray region that comprised only 6% of the total population, ruled the country with an iron fist for two decades, through its longtime leader and the Prime Minister of Ethiopia the late Meles Zenawi. The Oromia and Amhara regions, which comprise the two largest ethnic communities in the country, who go by the same name respectively, were sidelined by the TPLF. Their organizations OPDO and ANDM were also nothing more than puppets that followed their master TPLF even though they represented a huge constituency compared to TPLF. It is worth remembering here that the TPLF dominated the EPRDF and had expelled the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) who moved military operations outside Ethiopia, mainly from Eritrea, Sudan and Kenya’s jungles into central Ethiopia. The TPLF-led regime faced many challenges after taking power in 1991. Among them was the 2005 election where post-election riots resulted in many deaths in the capital Addis Ababa. Moreover, with its longstanding leader and longtime Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Melese Zenawi dying in 2012, the EPRDF faced huge challenges especially with regards to replacing the longtime leader. Eventually, Hailemariam Dessalegn of SPDM succeeded the late prime minister. It has been said that Hailemariam Desselegn did not really act as a prime minster, but rather was a marionette, a puppet, to say the least. It was the TPLFites who, behind the curtain, held the leading role. Hailemariam Dessalegn faced a huge popular protest especially after the announcement of the Addis Ababa Integrated Master Plan (AAIMP) in 2014. The AAIMP was a project intended to expand Addis Ababa’s border into the surrounding Oromia cities. This created a huge backlash from the young Oromos also called Qerroo (‘young man’ in Oromo language). Oromo youths also known as Qerroos crossing their hands in public to display their discontent The Qerroos became the anthem of another popular revolution in the country. They became the motor of the 21st century revolution, perhaps the largest by constituency and scale,that the country has ever seen. The protests engulfed the universities of the country and the Hailemariam government tried to silence the protests using force, which resulted in the death of more than 5,000 Qerroos in four years. Here it is also worth mentioning the role of diaspora media and influential people like Jawar Mohammed, the notable activist and director of the frontline media of the protest, the Oromia Media Network (OMN). The protests that erupted in Oromia later spread to the whole country, with other protests and long silenced voices being heard across many regions and towns. The protests cost too much, however, after four years they bore fruit with the resignation of Hailemariam Desalegn as Prime Minister of Ethiopia. The protests were also supported by the OPDO and ANDM authorities because of the visible problems that were occurring in the country. The OPDO and ANDM officials secretly formed a resistance team named after Lemma Megersa, the then president of the Oromia region. ‘Team Lemma’ as it was later called, operated in communication with the protestors to bring an end to TPLF’s hegemony. It should also be noted that cooperation between Amhara and Oromo was not expected by the TPLF because of the nature of the dominant political ideologies of the two camps. The Amharas favored a Unitarian set-up in the country, while the Oromos were adamant with regards to an ethno-linguistic federal structure. While the Amharas were regarded as assimilationists, the Oromos were often called “separationists”. It is through this historical discourse that the TPLF managed to lead the country as a diluting and a neutralizing agent in relation to the tensions between the Amhara and Oromo factions. However, Team Lemma proved the TPLFites wrong. The experiment to unite the Amhara and the Oromo forces was successful under Team Lemma, or at least it seemed to be. After the resignation of Hailemariam Dessalegn, there was a huge contest between TPLF and Team Lemma over who would take over the premiership. Team Lemma, being from the Oromo chapter had the dominant hand and was favored to take the position of the prime minister. However, Lemma Megersa, the leader of Team Lemma was not a member of the House of People’s Representatives (HPR) and so couldn’t become prime minister. His deputy, Abiy Ahmed (PhD) was elected in place of Lemma to represent the Oromo faction of EPRDF (the OPDO) in the urgent meeting to replace the departing prime minister. Abiy Ahmed won the majority of votes in the EPRDF executive meeting to become the president of the party and two days later, in April 2018 Abiy Ahmed (PhD) became the first Oromo Prime Minister of Ethiopia. Abiy Ahmed: the Voice of Synergy (Medemer) Abiy Ahmed sounded a voice of freedom, unity and love from the first day he became prime minister. From his first day in office, he made many big moves. He released more than 40,000 prisoners and prisoners of conscience. He traveled across every region in the country and preached love and unity and promised peace, stability and freedom. His philosophy is “medemer” roughly translated as synergy. According to Abiy Ahmed himself, medemer is nothing but a collective effort to fulfill a shared vision. He shook the country with this idea. But by far, the most extraordinary measure the prime minister took, was his reconciliation with Eritrea. Hailemariam Dessalegn handing the Constitution to Abiy Ahmed, the incoming Prime Minister of FDRE, on the day Abiy was inaugurated. As stated earlier, Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war over border disputes from 1998-2000, a conflict which was resolved by an intervention from the UN. In this conflict, which is regarded as one of Africa’s deadliest wars, no less than 100,000 people were killed from both sides. Since June 2000, Ethiopia and Eritrea had been in a no-war no-peace state. Abiy Ahmed was able to break this silence and extended a welcoming hand to the Eritrea’s longtime president Isaias Afewerki, after 18 years! Long story short, Ethiopia and Eritrea resolved their issues under the leadership of Abiy Ahmed which was the reason he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. Abiy also invited many of the exiled political figures and forces back into the country. Many of them returned to huge celebrations. Some of the most well-known returned political personalities included, Berhanu Nega (who had been expelled after the 2005 riot), Dawud Ibsa (exiled OLF leader), Jawar Mohammed and many others. While their admission to the country was a sign of democracy that was cheered and celebrated, it wasn’t without its consequences. They represented not only different popular segments of society, but also polarized political ideologies. Abiy Ahmed inherited a severely divided country with unresolved issues. His job was to heal the division and bring the various polarized ideologies in the country to the table. However, this wasn’t without its own challenges. Primarily, the polarized politics could not help his vision of a unified country. The term ‘unity’ has been associated with a specific political side in the country, just as ‘secessionist’ has also been tied to a specific political ideology. Every speech and action of the prime minister was critically observed and interpreted by different bodies in the country. Secondary to this was the issue with the TPLFites, which was not resolved. Since the ascension of the new prime minister, the TPLFites felt betrayed by the OPDO and ANDM who were already seen as siding with the people during the protest years. Hence, most of the TPLF members left their positions at federal level to focus on, and were limited to, their region, Tigray. Mekelle, the capital of the Tigray region became the center of opposition to Abiy Ahmed’s government. Furthermore, Abiy Ahmed’s government had also received challenges related to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) that was being built in the Bennishangul region of Ethiopia on the Abbay River (Blue Nile). When finished, GERD is going to be Africa’s largest hydroelectric power station. However, Ethiopia had to convince the lower Nile basin countries, particularly Egypt and Sudan, regarding the impact of the dam with regards to the content of the Nile water. Ethiopia had faced a huge challenge from the two countries prior to Abiy’s ascension to power, but was able to manage the challenges, as far as convincing Sudan to stand beside Ethiopia. However, following Abiy’s coming to power, the dynamics of the geo-politics of the horn of Africa, and East Africa in general, were yet to be unveiled. It is with those fierce challenges in play, that Abiy Ahmed’s government decided to undergo the 6th national election in 2020. The 6th National Election: the Postponement and its Consequences If the reader were to travel to the countryside in Ethiopia and ask how the 6th national election is being perceived, they might get very different perspectives. Some think that the election would have significant impact in the country, while others say that the election is nothing but the usual drama of the EPRDF (now the Prosperity Party). However, no matter how many different perspectives there are surrounding the election, there is a universal desire in the Ethiopian people that this election takes place peacefully. This is because the country has been on the verge of failure ever since the postponement of the election in 2020 was announced. While the postponement was due to the pandemic, what were the results of the election’s postponement? There are, I believe, five consequences of the postponement of the election that was supposed to take place in 2020. These consequences are the reason why the country is currently in an internationalized mess and why Abiy Ahmed went from a Nobel Laureate in 2019 to a suspected war monger and genocidal leader by the end of 2020. The first consequence of the postponement of the election, is the sentiment it created among different political parties in the country. The Oromo opposition parties saw the decision as the government’s way of illegitimately prolonging its term. Added to this was the already growing tension between TPLF and the government. They saw the decision by the government as a pretext to lead the country for a longer period. Secondly, the postponement also resulted in the TPLF defying the federal order and organizing its own regional election in Tigray. The TPLF badly wanted the election because they knew if the election were to take place in August 2020, Abiy Ahmed’s party would not win because of the huge contest it would face in the Oromia region. Hence, they saw the election as the easiest way of getting rid of Abiy Ahmed’s federal government. Seeing this from afar, the federal government seemed to use the pandemic to postpone the election. In June 2020, the TPLF executive committee decided to hold the election in Tigray region, defying the federal order. The constitution was silent about the issue of organizing a regional election and the TPLFites used this loophole to establish their own election committee. The tensions between the federal government and the Tigray region grew by the day. The Late Oromo singer and activist Hachalu Hundessa Thirdly, the postponed election already created discontent among Oromo parties, popular figures and supporters. This eventually grew into another round of protests by the Qerroos, the Oromo youths, who had been silent for a while since the ascension of the prime minister. The Qerroos demanded change in the Oromia and the opposition parties promised huge measures if they won the election. To the contrary, the Oromia chapter of the ruling party, PP, was dormant regarding popular questions. Gradually, pressure grew on the government, resulting in popular Oromo figures finally coming out in public denouncing the government’s actions. One of the popular Oromos was Hachalu Hundessa, a musician and an activist for Oromo rights who fought with music during the Oromo Protest of 2014-2016. Hachalu Hundessa was interviewed on OMN, a media outlet dominated by opposition narratives, and he made firm claims against the prime minister and his ideologies. Two weeks after his interview was aired on OMN, Hachalu Hundessa was assassinated. The government immediately blamed TPLF and Shene (the governments’ term for the Oromo Liberation Army that is the military wing of the now returned Oromo Liberation Front). Opposition parties and political figures accused the government of assassinating Hachalu and on the same day as his death, the government initiated a crackdown on major political figures in the country. Jawar Mohammed, Bekele Gerba, Hamza Borana and Dejene Tafa of the Oromo Federalist Congress party were arrested. Eskinder Nega from the Balderas party was also arrested. OLF’s party offices were also raided and major members of the party’s executive committee were thrown in jail. But it is also wise to ask how the Oromo youths grew discontented with Abiy Ahmed, an Oromo. There are several reasons, minor and major. However, the main reason relates to Abiy’s vision of a more unitary state, which would mean dismantling the current federal system. For many, this was demonstrated by Abiy’s dissolution of the EPRDF into a new merged party named Prosperity Party (PP) in October 2019. This was a huge decision for many because Abiy dissolved the EPRDF, which had ruled the country for nearly three decades. Prosperity Party, the newly merged party, had a Unitarian outlook rather than a federalist one. This was not welcomed by the Oromo youths and the Oromo parties. In fact even Lemma Megersa, the former Oromia president, did not welcome the merger. However, Abiy pressed on with his idea of a merged party. It is onto this dissatisfaction of the Oromo youths that the government added the indefinite postponement of the election. The fourth consequence of the postponement of the election was the growing armed resistance in Western Ethiopia. One of the Abiy Ahmed administration’s initial decisions was to welcome exiled political figures and fronts. OLF resisted returning home even after Abiy Ahmed went to invite them back. For this reason, the then Oromia president Lemma Megersa and the then Foreign Minister of Ethiopia Workneh Gebeyehu, went to Eritrea to discuss with Dawud Ibsa, OLF’s president. They reached a verbal agreement for OLF to return to the country. Dawud Ibsa was welcomed by millions of his supporters at Addis Ababa on that historic day in September 2018, six months after PM Abiy took office. However, OLF had an army—the Oromia Liberation Army (OLA), the majority of which was stationed in Eritrea, with some in Kenya and others in Western Oromia. While those OLA soldiers returning from Eritrea were disarmed and were assimilated into the government’s training program, the Western and Southern OLA commanders did not give up their armies and the trials to disarm those fronts failed a number of times following OLF’s admission into the country. This created an increased rivalry between Abiy Ahmed’s government and OLF’s Dawud Ibsa which finally forced OLF to separate itself from OLA in April 2019. The government undertook heavy military operations to eradicate OLA from Western and Southern Oromia in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and yet they did not manage to defeat them. OLA soldiers controlled a good part of the Western and Southern Oromia in 2019 alone. However, they returned to their guerrilla warfare against the government, which continues to this day. Following the postponement of the election, OLA released a press statement saying that the government would be illegitimate after September 2020. In the meantime, the other dangerous zone beside Western Oromia had been the Bennishangul region where Bennishangual Liberation Armies had been fighting with the federal government and the Amhara militias, resulting in the death of several civilians in the region. The Bennishangul fighters’ demands were very difficult to diagnose. However, the government linked them with the TPLF. The killings in Western Oromia and Bennishangul resulted in the last, but not the least consequence of the election’s postponement. The last but not least consequence of the postponement of the election has been the now internationalized war in Northern Ethiopia. It was expected by many that the TPLF and federal government would go to war. TPLF became a great threat to Abiy’s administration after they held their own election in September 2020. TPLF won the election by far, after competing with some parties based in the Tigray. The federal government did not recognize the election. The TPLF then started their propaganda saying that the federal government is illegitimate. As the tension between the federal government and the Tigray region grew, both parties began holding military parades in public, week after week. Abiy made several visits to Eritrea as a warning to the TPLF, since the TPLF-led EPRDF had gone to war with Eritrea in 1998-2000 and Isaias Afewerki, president of Eritrea, wanted revenge for the losses his government suffered during the war. On November 4, 2020, Abiy Ahmed appeared on national television to declare a state of emergency in the Tigray region, saying that the TPLF militias had attacked the Northern Command base of the Ethiopian Defense Force (EDF). Abiy labeled this war ‘law enforcement’ and invited Amhara militia, Eritrea and Somalian forces to side with him. Even though many local and international organizations warned both parties before the onset of this war, nothing seemed to have been able to stop the war from happening. Day after day, both sides declared victories in their media. Three weeks into the war, Abiy Ahmed declared the ‘final’ victory on national television, after conquering Mekelle, the capital of Tigray, saying that no civilian had been injured and Eritrean forces were not involved. However, the TPLF had chosen to scatter to the remote regions of Tigray to take up guerilla warfare. In the meantime President Isaias got his longtime desire of winning over the TPLF. Today, the simple ‘law enforcement’ that was started in November has reached its seven month, resulting in an incalculable number of deaths and a humanitarian crisis. The atrocities committed by the EDF, Amhara and Eritrean forces have been documented by major world news outlets. The issue has become a topic for the G7 and UN. Now, it is wise to pause and remember how the postponement of the election played a huge role in this devastating, and to this day, ongoing war. Despite what is happening in the country however, by the time of the writing of this article, the government is weeks away from undergoing the 6th national election. The 6th National Election: The Expectations By now the first question that would come to the reader’s mind might be, ‘What are Ethiopians expecting from this election?’ Well, to answer this question in short, there is not much expectation among the majority of Ethiopians in this election. Contests are expected in the Amhara region and Addis Ababa particularly. The election is not even going to take place in Somali. NEBE’s data shows that the election is not going to take place in many places including Western Oromia, parts of Bennishangul Gumuz region, the entire Somali and Tigray regions and so on. The European Union decided not to send a committee to watch the election process after the standard EU requirements were not met by the Ethiopian government. The Biden government of the United States of America urged for a national dialogue. This came after the US decision to restrict visas for Ethiopian and Eritrean officials following the atrocities committed in the Tigray war. The case for the Oromia region is a very different one. The Oromo people are not going to be represented in this election by any of the dominant parties since the leaders of the parties are imprisoned. Hence, only the ruling party is running for the election in Oromia, the largest region of the country. In the Amhara region, the second largest region, there are several parties besides the Prosperity Party (PP), such as the National Movement of the Amhara (NAMA), the Enat party, EZEMA and others. The results are yet to be predicted, let alone known in the Amhara region. A huge contest is expected. However, what would this bring to Ethiopians in general? It is yet to be known. Amhara politics is at its most complex, climactic stage. There are ethno-nationalists such as NAMA and partly the Amhara chapter of PP (APP) who advocate for a stronger Amhara region and the respect of Amhara rights, and there are Ethio-nationalists such as EZEMA and Enat. The Ethio-nationalists seem to be losing to the ethno-nationalists based on the campaigns we see. However, the result is yet to be known. One thing both the Ethio-nationalists and the Amhara ethno-nationalists have in common is that they both plan to change the 1995 FDRE constitution. The same is true in Addis Ababa. There are several parties running for office. EZEMA, Balderas and Prosperity Party are the three parties to have a huge contest in the city. EZEMA led by Birhanu Nega, PhD, is favored, if we can predict based on the 2005 election results where the majority of seats in Addis Ababa were won by CUD, Birhanu Nega’s party at the time. However, things have changed. Abiy Ahmed also has a huge constituency in Addis Ababa. Adanech Abebe, Addis Ababa’s mayor and a PP candidate, had a very successful campaign where many turned out en masse to support her. The Balderas Party, although younger than the above two, also has good support from the younger generation. Balderas’ campaign motto is to save Addis Ababa and to make Addis Ababa a self-governing region. Even if the election goes well, total results cannot be known and a new government cannot be formed since there are places and regions that will not go to the polls for security and other reasons. NEBE issued a press release saying that the second part of this election will be carried out on September 6, 2021. Until then, no one can know the exact result of the election. Hence, a new government will not be formed in June. The 6th national election of Ethiopia is then, an experiment that is going to take place with mixed feelings among Ethiopians. It will take place when Tigray is in the midst of a huge humanitarian crisis; Western Oromia is under command post; the world is watching the developments in Ethiopia closely; and a possible disintegration of the state is in the air. Naol Befkadu , MD, is a physician based in Addis Ababa. Previous Next

< Back THE CULTURAL INTERWEAVING OF CHINA AND THE BALKANS 15 Feb 2021 Marija Glavaš This text is the first in a series of close studies examining the cultural exchanges between China and the Balkan region under the BRI, taking art [events and exchanges] as its main focal point. In this introductory text I will explain my research process for mapping these activities . I will then present both the ambitions and challenges of intercultural exchanges, using Slovenia as an example. In future texts I will analyse some of these exhibitions I have investigated, with the hope of creating a dialogue around whether these exchanges are living up to their full potential of shifting away from classical national narratives and providing a common ground for different identities. Before I began this project with As you go… the roads under your feet, towards a new future, I only had a basic understanding of what the BRI was. Like many others here in the Balkan region, I have also heard of the ongoing Chinese investments – investments which initially appeared to only occur within the infrastructural sphere. What I have found, however, is that the BRI promised more than that. It promised cultural bonding above mere economic cooperation. Yet, whenever the BRI is mentioned, other spheres, such as culture and art, seem to remain of very little note. As I began my investigation, I realized there was an absence of any systematic research on these topics – gathering data and developing a concise method of collating it, presented itself as the greater concern before even beginning to open up [a] discourse on cultural exchange and interconnection. To begin this dialogue of cultural interweaving, I have decided to focus on cross-institutional artistic exchanges to identify both the frequency and motives of these relationships. For this purpose, I used two methods: the primary method was directly addressing art institutions by sending them a questionnaire, while the other was manually collecting data from the internet for any additional exhibitions. The questionnaire included identifying whether any exhibitions and exchanges were currently underway, what kind of art was being exhibited or exchanged, the motivations behind these collaborations, and if there were any abnormalities across audience engagement and reception. For institutions that did not have any such exchanges, I asked why that was – did they decline them for any reason or were there simply no opportunities (perhaps due to a lack of funding, governmental or structural support, amongst other institutional roadblocks)? This questionnaire was sent to thirty-six [36] institutions from Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Kosovo. Some of the institutions were nationally owned museums and galleries (of both artistic and historical content), while others were privately owned galleries. Of the thirty-six museums and galleries I reached out to, twenty have replied. Following this, I started documenting all available data that was brought to my attention. I encountered several problems during this stage. Firstly, I did not receive responses from all institutions – most notably I received none from privately owned galleries. This could, however, also be due to many things: the ongoing pandemic that has shut down galleries and museums in many places and – as I later came to notice – the fact that most of these exchanges were primarily happening through state owned institutions. The second problem I encountered was that for many of these events and cultural exchanges, I was only provided with sparse data. Thirdly, I was unable to gather any data on audience reception. This last problem proved the most difficult as I was most interested in examining how local audiences perceive not only the Chinese art being exhibited, but also in a broader sense, the cultural interweaving of China within these regions. In the future it would be interesting to focus further on this aspect since there are a lot of discrepancies in opinions on other aspects (such as on the infrastructural and economic investments) of the BRI. While the West seems to be very suspicious of China becoming a global superpower, the Balkan region – which is heavily influenced both by the West and the East – doesn’t have such a narrow perception. Together with other partner cells and the editorial team, we decided it would be interesting to present this collected data on a map . This map provides details on both local cultural events and its connections to China. All exhibitions are also described, accompanied by some images from the exhibitions. The map is intended to be alive and continuously growing – the biggest ambition is currently to expand the scope of this map to encompass Central Asia and other localities participating in the BRI. I approached my research this way to systematically examine the ways in which art under the BRI ought to, on the one hand, deepen the bonds amongst participating countries and on the other, shape their perceptions of one another. Art, besides being a tool of expression, greatly impacts cultures and societies; it is continuously shaping our realities, while also allowing us to more deeply understand the past and the present. This understanding is not only constructed through artistic content at any given time in any specific space, but also through cultural policies and curating. Cultural policies and curatorship prescribes the limits and protocols [within] which art can shape the future, and how the past and present can be understood. Intercultural collaborations within this sphere have a great potential to move away from classical national narratives, which too often look for an enemy – within or outside – as a common denominator, consequently weaponizing audiences against this predetermined opposition. Whether these intercultural collaborations are even possible however, remains in the hands of individual governments and private bureaucracies who choose if, how, and when they will collaborate. For instance, let us look at the current state of art in Slovenia. Ever since Slovenia became a capitalist state, it left art partially in the domain of the government and partially in the domain of the free market. Art in the domain of the predatory free market has its own problems: subjected to competitiveness, artistic objects and practices are placed at the mercy of the logic of profit-driven, capitalist motivations – left to die as soon as its monetary value drops too low. However, since BRI projects are mostly funded and held by state institutions, for now, this stage of the research will focus on this particular domain. Let me preface this by saying that all curating is some form of narrating and mediating meaning(s), though this example will focus on cultural policies which determine in whose hands the curating will be. In Slovenia, state-owned art institutions enjoyed relative autonomy albeit with insufficient financial support – particularly in specific fields – being their main problem. Aside from the prevalent nepotism in funding (and the subsequent responsibility that would attach itself to the beneficiaries), there was not much state intervention into the curating itself. However, this drastically began to change since the undemocratic rise of the 14th government of independent Slovenia, right before the pandemic of 2020. The undemocratically established government is using tactics that have proven detrimental to Poland, Hungary, and Russia. In addition to drastic funding and budget cuts (alongside overall rhetoric and the replacement of leadership roles), [the government] has taken to directly attacking media outlets, research institutions, and museums. Academics who specialize in the fields of Central and South East Europe pointed out in an Open Letter to Janez Janša, Prime Minister of Slovenia in 2020: “The frequency of such interventions and the many clear signals that [are only] more are to come further prove that these are not normal personnel decisions, but rather the first steps in an attempt to curtail the independence of scholars and to place narratives about the past under government control.” [1] This becomes even more evident when we look at which institutions are being attacked: the National Museum of Contemporary History, which holds a permanent exhibition of Slovenia in the 20th century, directly addressing our past as a member state of former Yugoslavia and our gain of independence; [2] the National Gallery, and the Modern Gallery – both some of the most prominent and well-known art institutions in Slovenia. [3] In addition, the government is planning to open the Research Institute of the Venetic theory, [4] which suggests that the origins of Slovenians do not begin with Slav settlements but rather, reach back to ancient times. This theory is widely considered a pseudoscience and has been rejected by scholars. Our prime minister, however, holds yearly meetings for supporters of this theory, and when considering how they like to rewrite our history, it should also raise alarms that they are planning to open the Museum of Independence of Slovenia. [5] The current enemy threat being constructed is our history as a member state of Yugoslavia, the Yugonostalgia many people still feel, non-catholic nations, and anyone who lies left to the [government] on the political compass. Clearly, these are attempts to not only shift the cultural sphere towards a more patriotic and nationalistic narrative, but a narrative that is directly in support of our current prime minister – his role in the battle for independence and his personal beliefs. I would like to argue that these current changes within the cultural and art spheres in Slovenia are what could be considered some of the worst approaches possible. Art in this scenario is not being mobilized, in a romantic sense, to enable a peaceful coexistence of identities, but rather, is being used to annihilate some to push others forward. In the context of intercultural interweaving this could mean a step backwards, since focusing on enemies and weaponizing audiences does not leave much space for a friendly co-existence. In terms of the BRI, we are yet to see where this will place Slovenia. Our prime minister has, in American fashion, began engaging in conspiracy theories about China, where he points to the supposed political interference of China with his opposition. [6] At a fundamental political level, this paranoia doesn’t bring much optimism in relation to the potential of future cultural interweaving and exchanges. Even the connection between Slovenia and Hungary, which our current government considers of utmost importance, is only happening directly through the military, and a mutual support of hate-driven, local news-media. On the other hand, the BRI greatly emphasizes a peaceful coexistence of identities. From what I have gathered in this first phase of my research, it appears that these exchanges are an effort to bring cultures closer together through mutual and empathetic understanding, which has been overtly stated on most of the observed exhibitions. This understanding is being created through a bilateral exchange of artefacts, meanings, technical knowledge, and human resources. In conclusion, intercultural interweaving has a great potential of shifting away from classical national narratives that forge bonds as a response to the presence of a threat. National identity itself is constructed through these mechanisms (ie. the search for a common enemy), so a greater understanding and knowledge of different cultures is needed to look beyond this. Participating countries have already agreed to these processes of interweaving, and as politics and culture remain ever changing, the consideration of current cultural policies and their changes is always necessary. And when considering that to curate is to narrate, another analysis will be needed to betterfully understand exactly what narratives are being told and how much positive potential they actually hold. In the future, I will attempt to do such an analysis of the exhibitions presented on the map. This will, I hope, allow for a deeper discourse and engagement on whether these projects are living up to their full potential of being used as a force for cultural harmony than separation. Marija Glavaš , student of Culturology at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana [1] A Letter to Janez Janša, Prime Minister of Slovenia. (2020). Available at: https://publiclettertoslovenia.wordpress.com/ [2] Exhibition can be seen here: http://www.muzej-nz.si/si/razstave/stalne-razstave/849-Slovenci-v-XX-stoletju [3] Marshall, A. (2021). A Populist Leader Kicks Off a Culture War, Starting in Museums. The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/arts/design/slovenia-Janez-Jansa-culture.html [4] Jager, V. (2020). Janša ustanavlja inštitut, ki bo na novo napisal zgodovino izvora Slovencev. Mladina. Available at: https://www.mladina.si/200605/jansa-ustanavlja-institut-ki-bo-na-novo-napisal-zgodovino-izvora-slovencev/ [5] Marshall, A. (2021). A Populist Leader Kicks Off a Culture War, Starting in Museums. The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/arts/design/slovenia-Janez-Jansa-culture.html [6] Janša, J. (2021). [@JJansaSDS]. #KUL neposredno financiran kar od Kitajske komunistične partije? [Tweet]. Twitter. Available at: https://twitter.com/JJansaSDS/status/1354022974685409281 ; Janša, J. (2021). [@JJansaSDS]. Agentura #CCPChina ? [Tweet]. Twitter. Available at: https://twitter.com/JJansaSDS/status/1355831337819762689 Previous Next

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BOR ENCOUNTERS AUGUST 1 1, 2022 WCSCD CURAT ORIAL INQUIRIES As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new f uture September 15th –September 19th 2022 www.wcscd.c om www.biblioteka-bor.org.rs Novim putevima u novu budućnost Borski susreti 15–19. septembar 2022. www.wcscd.com www.biblioteka-bor.org.rs Saopštenje domaćina bibliotekara Dragana Stojmenovića Narodna biblioteka Bor Konačno okupljanje učesnika projekta Novim putevima u novu budućnost na Borskim susretima, nadamo se, neće biti i kraj tog putovanja, mada se može učiniti da je Bor negde daleko i na kraju novog Pojasa i puta – kao nekakva bogato ukrašena, zlatna kopča na kaubojskom opasaču ili možda još jedna rupa za zatezanje ili opuštanje tog kaiša. Konačno ćemo se upoznati, družiti, razmatrati šta smo sve radili u prethodnom periodu na promociji zbornika i predstaviti ga najširoj javnosti, pritom, žaliti uništeno prirodno okruženje, tražiti sakrivene priče među zidovima biblioteke, lutati i otkrivati borske arkade – lukove između stubova francuske kolonijalne uprave, socijalističkog baroka i neokolonijalne prakse liberalnog kapitalizma, na kraju zajednički obedovati hranu koju će pripremati gosti/domaćini. Treba još samo da se dogovorimo kako ćemo dalje, koji put ćemo izabrati. Nadamo se da ćemo imati snage da ostanemo i opstanemo tu gde jesmo, dok ne izgradimo svoje puteve, ne očekujući da će nas oni voditi prema predvidljivim i očekivanim odredištima, već ka otkrivalačkim i oslobođenim izražajima bezinteresnog stvaralaštva, kretanja i susretanja. Saopštenje gostiju U momentu kada čitate ovo saopštenje, trebalo bi da je sve već spremno za Borske susrete, koji se odvijaju u sklopu projekta Novim putevima u novu budućnost, te vas očekujemo da zajedno šetamo kroz Bor. Bor je mali grad, pa se ne bih začudila ako niste ni čuli za njega. U njemu se nalazi naš domaćin ovih susreta – Narodna biblioteka Bor. Bor je, takođe, poznat po ležištima bakra i rudarskoj industriji, koja se razvija od početka 20. veka, ali i po tome što je rudarsko-metalurški kompleks nedavno kupio kineski rudarski gigant Ciđin (Zijin). Kinesko investiranje u borsku rudarsku industriju proizvelo je mnoštvo novinskih napisa povodom raseljavanja stanovništva, eksproprijacije zemljišta i zagađenja. Bor je, pored toga, i popularna filmska lokacija. Njegove „ozlede” od rudarenja ogromne su, ali i fotogenične, pa je grad pozadina dešavanja u više filmova. Međutim, mi u Bor ne dolazimo da bismo iskopali još jednu sliku njegovih sve širih rana. Kao deo transnacionalnog istraživačkog tima Novim putevima u novu budućnost, dolazimo da bismo se okupili; da bismo sa ljudima iz Bora išli u šetnje koje će organizovati Jelica Jovanović; da bismo probali hranu koju će nam Hu Jun spremiti sa Ćuom, kineskim kuvarom koji sprema obroke za kineske radnike koji žive i rade u borskom Ciđinu; da bismo sa umetnicom Džesfi Dženg u borskoj biblioteci smestili Priče između zidova i da bismo sa Robelom Temesgenom ožalili mesto. To će biti naš prvi fizički susret od kada smo, u februaru 2020, u Adis Abebi, pokrenuli naše zajedničko istraživanje, iako znamo da nekoliko naših kolega, zbog zatvorenih granica, neće moći da nam se fizički pridruži. Pored toga, tokom Susreta prvi put ćemo javno i u fizičkom prostoru podeliti naš rad. Borski susreti uključuju i promociju publikacije Novim putevima u novu budućnost, koja izbliza prikazuje naš zajednički način rada i istraživanja koji praktikujemo od 2020. Zbornik je objavljen u saradnji sa IK Mus (Milano) i Umetničkim muzejom Rokband (Šangaj), a priredila ga je Biljana Ćirić. Učesnici: Robel Temesgen (umetnik, Adis Abeba), Laris Frožje (direktor Umetničkog muzeja Rokband u Šangaju), Sinkne Ešetu (pisac, Adis Abeba), Ajgerim Kapar (samostalni kustos, Almati, Kazahstan), Jelica Jovanović (arhitektica, Beograd), Hu Jun (umetnik, Beograd/Šangaj/Melburn), Džesfi Dženg (umetnica, Sjamen/Šangaj), Dragan Stojmenović (Narodna biblioteka Bor), simona dvorak (kustoskinja), Vladimir Radivojević (fotograf, Bor), Nebojša Jamasaki (umetnik), dr Visa Tasić (inženjer elektronike), Miloš Božić (član lokalne zajednice Krivelja), Katica Radojković (proizvođač i prodavac sira), Nemanja Stefanović (student) Organizatori: Šta bi kustosiranje moglo / trebalo da bude i Narodna biblioteka Bor Koncepcija: Biljana Ćirić Novim putevima u novu budućnost – Borski susreti Vise o projektu: „Novim putevima u novu budućnost – Borski susreti” jesu prilika da prvi put fizički, u javnom prostoru podelimo ne samo rezultate naših istraživanja već i naš način rada zasnovan na relacionalnosti i uzajamnoj zavisnosti, koji pronosimo dok hodamo jedni sa drugima. „Novim putevima u novu budućnost” dugoročni je projekat i istraživačko ispitivanje kojim se promišlja inicijativa „Pojas i put” i kako će ona izmeniti estetike i prakse svakodnevnog života u različitim lokalnim kontekstima u Etiopiji, Srbiji, Sloveniji, Uzbekistanu, Kini, Kazahstanu. Ustanovili smo šta nam je zajedničko, uključujući nasleđa socijalizma i nesvrstanosti, neogeopolitičko okruženje, ekonomske uticaje (naročito kineskog i arapskog sveta na srodne lokalitete, čak i upošljavanje istih kompanija u različitim regionima), zalaganje za sopstvenu kulturu i nedavnu pandemiju kovida 19, što su nam smernice za istraživanje. Od aprila 2020, zbog pandemije, koristimo strategiju „istražuj tu gde jesi”, sarađujući sa 15 istraživača po Kazahstanu, Uzbekistanu, Etiopiji, Srbiji, Sloveniji i Kini. Istraživačka pitanja razvijamo trudeći se da imamo sluha za lokalne hitne potrebe i da iz njih izvlačimo nauk. Na taj način, formulisane su brojne studije slučaja i sprovedena brojna istraživanja. Borski susreti predstavljaju kulminaciju našeg rada i istraživanja obavljenih u prethodne dve godine, a uključivaće brojne javne događaje. Tačka preseka i uvek mogućih razdvajanja ovog preispitivanja jeste Kina. Istraživanje smo sproveli s kolegama u Kini, ne bežeći od nevolje, kako bi rekla Dona Haravej. Spominjanje Kine nosi svoje breme, ali šta danas znači govoriti o Kini? Trin Minha kaže da ime ne sadrži i ne uokviruje stvarnost. Kada nam se stvarnost obraća, u ovom ovde stvaramo neko drugde, i to smo upravo i pokušavali da učinimo. Naša strategija bila je da ne pričamo o Kini kao Drugom već da govorimo zajedno sa Kinom ili da govorimo sa Borom. Potpuni program dešavanja po danima biće objavljen 1. septembra. Svi događaji su otvoreni za publiku i besplatni, tako da jedva čekamo da hodamo sa vama. Detaljnije o Novim putevima u novu budućnost Novim putevima u novu budućnost inicirala je i koncipirala Biljana Ćirić. U ovom istraživanju učestvuju: Šta bi kustosiranje moglo/trebalo da bude (Beograd), Zdenka Badovinac (Ljubljana), Umetnički muzej Rokband (Šangaj), Muzej Tajms (Guangdžu), ArtCom (Astana), Robel Temesgen i Sinkne Ešetu (Adis Abeba) i Narodna biblioteka Bor. Prvu fazu projekta podržali su: Fondacija za umetničke inicijative (FFAI), CURTAIN (Umetnički muzej Rokband), Austrijski kulturni forum, Kustoska praksa Fakulteta za umetnost, dizajn i arhitekturu Univerziteta Monaš i, putem stipendije, Program za istraživačke obuke Vlade Australije. Borski susreti imaju dodatnu podršku norveške Kancelarije za savremenu umetnost i Fondacija za umetničke inicijative (FFAI)i Monas Univerziteta u Melburnu. Za vise informacija o projektu kontaktirajte: Moniku Husar mokahusar@gmail.com Violetu Stojmenovic sloterdajk@gmail.com Kratke biografije učesnika Sinkne Ešetu (pseudonim: O’Tam Pulto) – pisac i pejzažni arhitekta, strastveni izučavalac kulturnih pejzaža kao kombinovanih učinaka prirode i kulture. Na osnovu svojih istraživanja i tumačenja kulturnih pejzaža, piše romane i priče za decu s ciljem da pomogne da se održe starosedelačke kulture i prirodni ekosistemi. Dragan Stojmenović je diplomirao na Odeljenju za etnologiju i antropologiju Filozofskog fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu. U Boru živi od 1974, a od 2000. radi u Narodnoj biblioteci Bor; od 2005. kao rukovodilac Zavičajnog odeljenja. Bavi se foto-dokumentacijom. Godine 2021. objavio je knjigu O foto-dokumentaciji Francuskog društva Borskih rudnika. Rođen 1987. u Etiopiji, Robel Temesgen trenutno je na doktorskim studijama na Nacionalnoj akademiji umetnosti u Oslu. Zvanje mastera umetnosti stekao je 2015. na Akademiji savremene umetnosti Univerziteta Tromse u Norveškoj, a osnovne umetničke studije slikarstva završio je 2010. u Školi za umetnost i dizajn „Ale“ Univerziteta u Adis Abebi. Dobio je više stipendija za studijske boravke; stipendirali su ga, između ostalih, Program Junge Akademije umetnosti u Berlinu i Program švedskog međunarodnog komiteta za stipendiranje umetnika u oblasti vizuelnih i primenjenih umetnosti IASPIS u Štokholmu. Njegovi radovi izlažu se na međunarodnim platformama odnosno grupnim i samostalnim izložbama. Ajgerim Kapar je nezavisni kustos, kulturni aktivista, osnivač kreativne platforme Artkom. Rođen 1987. u Kazahstanu, živi i radi u Almatiju i Astani (Nur Sultan). Kustos je i organizator izložbi, umetničkih intervencija u gradskom prostoru, javnih diskusija, predavanja, radionica. Sarađuje sa umetničkim i obrazovnim ustanovama i naučnim grupacijama. U saradnji sa umetničkom zajednicom, 2015. osnovao je Artkom, otvorenu platformu koja povezuje kulturne poslenike, kako bi razmenili iskustva i pronašli kanale za interakciju sa društvom, u cilju razvoja i promocije savremene umetnosti i kulture. Godine 2017, Ajgerim je inicirao i neformalnu školu Umetnički sudarač: kad umetnost sretne nauku. Jelica Jovanović (1983) – arhitektkinja i studentkinja doktorskih studija na Tehnološkom univerzitetu u Beču, nezavisna istraživačica. Diplomirala je na Arhitektonskom fakultetu Univerziteta u Beogradu. Osnivačica je i članica NVO Grupa arhitekata, s kojom radi na nekoliko projekata: Letnja škola arhitekture u Baču i Rogljevu, od 2010; (Ne)primereni spomenici, od 2015; Podizanje zavese, 2014–2016, izloženo na Bijenalu u Veneciji 2014. Hu Jun u svom radu obilazi istorijske momente zarad njihovih alternativnih čitanja, pri čemu u te prakse uključuje i umetničku autorefleksiju vezanu za poreklo i lične veze. Izabrane samostalne izložbe: Slika prirode (Image of Nature, Prirodnjački muzej u Londonu, 2010); Naši preci (Our Ancestors, Institut Gete u Šangaju, 2012), Pažljivo podići i Bolest pripovedanja (Lift with Care, Narration Sickness, obe u AIKE-u u Šangaju, 2013. i 2016), Još jedna diorama (Another Diorama, Muzej Nacionalnog univerziteta u Singapuru, 2019). Radovi su mu izlagani i u Elektrocentrali umetnosti u Šangaju, Centru Pompidu u Parizu, Kulturnom centru Beograda, Parasajtu u Hongkongu i Muzeju Tajms u Guangdžuu. Učestvovao je i na 4. Trijenalu u Guangdžuu 2012, 11. Bijenalu u Kvangdžuu 2016, 6. Bijenalu u Singapuru 2019. i 10. Trijenalu Azija Pacifik. Suosnivač je umetničkog e-časopisa PDF (2012–2013). Laris Frožje je direktor Umetničkog muzeja Rokband u Šangaju od 2012. Od 2013. predsednik je žirija za dodelu Nagrade HUGO BOSS ASIA ART, pri čemu je ovu nagradu, izložbu i istraživački program zamislio kao evoluirajuću platformu koja omogućava da se Aziji pristupi kao konstrukciji koju treba preispitati, a ne kao monolitnoj oblast fiksiranih identiteta. Od 2020, Rokband je deo dugoročnog istraživačkog programa Novim putevima u novu budućnost, koji je zamislila samostalna kustoskinja Biljana Ćirić. Godine 2020. Frožje je, sa Alfijem Čuaom, osnovao duet Ocean & Wavz, koji se bavi produkcijom teksta, zvuka i slike. „Uzimajući u obzir da potičemo sa pacifičkih arhipelaga u Aziji i iz Evrope, razvili smo umetničke projekte na osnovu željenih kombinacija i referenci, prevazilazeći granice i koristeći discipline i puteve koji operišu na više nivoa. Stoga, ni sebe ni svoje radove ne ograničavamo na jednu oblast, jedan identitet, jednu disciplinu, kategoriju ili jedan žanr. Istražujući tradicionalnu i elektronsku muziku, pišući poeziju i eseje, kombinujući predavanja sa vizuelnim izvedbama i di-džej sesijama, negujemo paradokse zarad oslobađanja iskustava i kritičkih perspektiva.“ Vladimir Radivojević je ulični fotograf iz Bora. Ljubav prema fotografskim istraživanjima i fotografsku opremu nasledio je od oca. Aktivno se bavi analognom i digitalnom fotografijom od 2005. Izlagao je svoje radove na grupnim izložbama: „Trajni čas umetnosti – Bor” i „0 km”, kao i u štampanim i elektronskim medijima: Le Monde diplomatique – hrvatsko izdanje, br. 9 (2013) i Borski almanah: ulična fotografija kao zajednička antropologija. Serija fotografija „Borski almanah” rezultat je višegodišnjeg beleženja života pasa lutalica. Njihova svakodnevna borba, lutanje i prepuštenost samima sebi moguća su metafora društva u periodu tranzicije, ovde i sada. simona dvorak – međuzavisna kustoskinja. Razvijam projekte koji se realizuju u regionu Il de Frans (Ile-de-France), ali me interesuju i centralnoevropska i istočnoveropska scena. U praksi me interesuju izvođački formati specifični za određene teritorijalne i vremenske kontekste, uz vrednovanje dugoročnog kolektivnog rada. Preispitujem mogućnosti stvaranja prostora „zajedničkog” u kulturnoj sferi, pre svega kao kustoskinja Inicijative za prakse i vizije radikalne brige (Nataša Petreš Bašle, Elena Sorokina). Radim na stvaranju izložbenih postavki kao „aktivnih prostora” koji nam dozvoljavaju da delimo znanje i anticipiramo moguće budućnosti: antiseksističke, antirasističke, inkluzivne. Te strategije se zasnivaju na učenju i odučavanju kao dekolonijalnoj metodologiji, na metodologijama razvijenim tokom doktorskog istraživačkog paraseminara profesorice umetnosti i teorije Nore Šternfeld na Univerzitetu umetnosti u Hamburgu, u kojem i sama učestvujem, i na praksi kulturnog „otpora” koja se razvija pod vođstvom Joane Varše u Kustoskoj laboratoriji Univerziteta Konstfak u Stokholmu. Iskustava koja sam stekla kao nezavisna kustoskinja produbljivala sam radeći pri kulturnim ustanovama kao što su Nacionalna galerija u Pragu (2015), Nacionalni muzej Pikaso u Parizu (2018) ili Centar Pompidu, gde sam 2018. radila uz Kristin Masel, a 2019. uz Ilariju Konti i Katrin Vir za Kosmopolis #2, zatim odeljenje za kulturni razvoj projekta „Kulture budućnosti“– evropske mreže i inovacionog programa za kulturne stvaraoce sutrašnjice, gde radim od 2021. Trenutno sam stipendista rezidencijalnog programa 15. Dokumente u Kaselu za edukatore u oblasti umetnosti i asistentkinja Biljane Ćirić i Projekta Balkan za javni program Hod sa vodom, koji se održava u Beogradu, a povezan je sa samostalnom izložbom Vladimira Nikolića u sklopu Paviljona Srbije na 59. Bijenalu u Veneciji. Dr Viša Tasić – inženjer elektronike, zaposlen u Institutu za rudarstvo i metalurgiju u Boru. Miloš Božić – član Mesne zajednice Krivelj. Katica Radojković – proizvođačica i prodavačica sira na mlečnoj pijaci u Boru. Nemanja Stefanović – student komunikologije i član pozorišta za mlade u Boru. Nebojša Jamasaki Vukelić rođen je 1986. u Beogradu, gde živi i radi. Završio je master studije slikarstva na Fakultetu likovnih umetnosti u Beogradu 2021. Svoj rad uglavnom bazira na mediju crteža, kroz koji tematizuje pitanje ličnih i kolektivnih kapaciteta za društvenu imaginaciju. Pojam kraja sveta važan je aspekt njegovog rada, kao marker anksioznosti koju pojedinci doživljavaju u savremenom kontekstu, ali i kao izraz otpora postojećim društvenim, ekonomskim i političkim uslovima. Izlagao je na brojnim grupnim izložbama i jednoj samostalnoj – „Unutra sve biće meko i nežno”, u Galeriji X Vitamin. Jedan je od dobitnika nagrade za crtež Fonda „Vladimir Veličković” za 2021. godinu, kao i Nagrade „Miodrag Janjušević – akademski slikar” za istu godinu. Kuvar Ću, koji živi i radi u Boru od 2019, pre dolaska u Bor živeo je i radio u Kambodži. Priprema otvaranje restorana kineske hrane u Boru. Biljana Ćirić je međuzavisna kustoskinja. Kustoskinja je paviljona Republike Srbije na 59. Bijenalu u Veneciji. Osnovala je obrazovnu platformu Šta kustosiranje treba/može da uradi? 2018. godine. Bila je nominovana za Nagradu za kustose „Nezavisna vizija” (Independent Vision Curatorial Award, 2012), koju dodeljuje međunarodno udruženje nezavisnih kustosa ICI. Trenutno razvija dugoročni projekat koji se bavi kineskom inicijativom Pojas i put, naslovljen Novim putevima u novu budućnost. Pohađa praktične doktorske studije kustoskih praksi na Fakultetu za umetnost, dizajn i arhitekturu Univerziteta Monaš u Melburnu. Press statement from Dragan Stojmenovic, librarian, Bor Public Library, partner cell of the inquiry “The long-awaited gathering of the participants of the As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future project at the Bor Encounters will hopefully not be the end of that journey, although it might be said that Bor is somewhere far away, and at the end of the Belt and Road–like some kind of richly decorated, golden buckle on a cowboy belt, or maybe another hole to tighten or loosen that belt. We will finally get to know each other, socialize, consider what we have done so far to promote our shared work and present it to the widest public, at the same time, we will regret the destroyed natural environment, look for hidden stories among the walls of the library, wander and discover Bor’s arcades–the arches between the columns of the French colonial administration, socialist baroque, and neo-colonial practices of liberal capitalism, in the end, we will eat together the food prepared by the guests-hosts. We just need to agree on how to proceed, what road we will choose. We hope that we will have the strength to stay and survive where we are, until we build our own roads, not expecting them to lead us to predictable and presumed destinations, but to revealing and liberating free expressions of disinterested creativity, movement and encounter.” Statement from us guests and visitors of Bor By the time you read this, most of the preparations for As you go… Bor encounters should be done and we are waiting to walk with you in Bor. Bor is small town and I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of it. It is where Public Library Bor, is located and together we will be hosting number of encounters. Bor is also a site known for its copper mining industry, which has existed since the early 20th century, but also for the recent purchase of its mining complex by Chinese mining giant Zijin. Chinese investment in Bor’s mining industry has created many headlines with regards to land disputes, pollution and relocations. Bor is a very popular film location. Its extraction wounds are vast and photogenic and appear as the background in many movies. We are not going to Bor to extract yet another image of its ever-expanding wounds. We are going to Bor to spend time together as part of transnational inquiry As you go…roads under the feet towards the new future; to walk with people in Bor, as organized by Jelica Jovanovic ; to eat meals that Hu Yun will cook with Qiu, a Chinese chef who cooks for Chinese workers living and working in Bor Zijin; to gift with artist Jasphy Zheng situating Stories from the Room in Bor Library and to mourn the place together with Robel Temesgen . This will be our first physical meeting since we launch the enquiry in February 2020 in Addis Ababa, although we know for sure that a few colleagues will not be able to physically attend due to closed borders. In addition, this will be our first moment of sharing with public in physical location. The days in Bor also include launch of publication of inquiry As you go…done in collaboration with Mousse Publishing House and Rockbund Art Museum and edited by Biljana Ciric that looks closely into our mode of working and research done since 2020. Participants Robel Temesgen (artist, Addis Ababa); Larys Frogier (director, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai); Sinkneh Eshetu (writer, Addis Ababa); Aigerim Kapar (interdependent curator, Almaty); Jelica Jovanovic (architect, Belgrade) in collaboration with Dr. Visa Tasic (engineer of electronics), Milos Bozic (member of local community in Krivelj), Katica Radojkovic ( producer and seller of cheese), Nemanja Stefanovic ( student), Hu Yun (artist, Belgrade/Shanghai/Melbourne); Jasphy Zheng (artist, Xia Men/Shanghai); Dragan Stojmenovic (Public Library, Bor); Nikita Choi (chief curator, Times Museum, Guangzhou), simona dvorak ( curator), Vladimir Radivojevic (photographer), Nebojsa Yamasaki (artist). Organized by What Could Should Curating Do and the Bor Public Library Conceived by Biljana Ciric As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future – Bor encounters | Introduction As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future – Bor encounter is the first physical public moment of sharing not only our research but also our mode of working based on relationality and interdependence that we bring with us as we move forward. As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future is a long-term project and research inquiry that reflects on the Belt and Road Initiative and how it will alter the aesthetics and practices of everyday life in different local contexts of Ethiopia, Serbia, Slovenia, Uzbekistan, China, Kazakhstan. We have established set commonalities as guidelines of our research including socialism, non-aligned legacies , neo-geopolitical settings, economical influences (especially that of the Chinese and Arab world within localities of similar patterns, that have even employed the same companies through different regions), being an agent of its own culture, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Since April 2020, due to the pandemic, we have employed the strategy “dig where you stand”, and have been working with 15 researchers across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Serbia, Slovenia, and China. The research inquiry has been developed trying to listen to local urgencies and learn from them. From there a number of case studies had been formulated and research conducted. Bor encounters is culmination of our work and research done in last two years and will include, number of public moments. China operates within this inquiry as a point of connection, but always with the potential of separation. We did this research with colleagues in China, staying with the trouble as Donna Haraway says. China’s name carries many burdens but what does it mean to talk about China today? Trinh T. Min-ha states that reality cannot be contained and framed in a name. When reality speaks to us, we create an elsewhere within the here and this is what we have trying to do. This was our strategy—not to talk about China as the other, but to speak with China or to speak with Bor. More about As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future is initiated and conceived by Biljana Ciric. The inquiry and research cells include What Could Should Curating Do (Belgrade), Zdenka Badovinac (Ljubljana), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), ArtCom (Astana), Robel Temesgen and Sinkneh Eshetu (Addis Ababa), and The Bor Public Library. The first stage of the project has been supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives, CURTAIN (Rockbund Art Museum), Austrian Cultural Forum, Curatorial Practice (Monash University Art, Design and Architecture), and the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Bor encounters received additional support from Office for Contemporary Art, Norway. As you go… Bor encounters participants biographies: Sinkneh Eshetu (penname: O’Tam Pulto), a published author and landscape architect, is passionate about cultural landscapes – the combined works of culture and nature. He develops his novels and children stories based on his studies and interpretation of cultural landscapes to help preserve indigenous cultures and natural ecosystems. He develops positive youth development and empowerment media products for children and youth f. Among his 9 published works, fiction and non-fiction are ‘Catch Your Thunder: Rendezvous With the End’ (2015, Partridge Africa ), ‘A Thousand Versions of Love: The Tao of the Dusty Foot Philosopher’ (2014, Oland Books), ‘Affordance-Based Conceptual Framework for Landscape Architecture: Dealing With Change in Fixity and Fixity in Change’ (2012, Lap Lambert Academic Publishers). In the process of publishing are his 12 children books, a ‘Fruitycity Series: Appo My Friend’, based on Fruitycity Children’s World that he has created– an imaginary world where children are leaders. He is a founder of a start-up – a social entrepreneurship company called ‘Fruitycity Children’s World, which he currently manages. Dragan Stojmenović graduated in Ethnology and Anthropology from the Faculty of Philosophy (Belgrade, Serbia), and has been living and working in Bor, Serbia since 1974. Since 2000, he has been working at the Bor Public Library; since 2005 as a Local History Department librarian. He is the author and chief manager of Digitization of Non-book Materials, Cultural and Public Activities of the Public Library Bor; and the editor and curator of several cultural programs, exhibitions and public lecture series, as well as the online platform http://digitalnizavicaj.org.rs/ . He has also been an associate of numerous cultural organizations and NGOs, and a co-author of their various projects and programs. His book On French Society of Bor’s Mines photographic documentation was published in 2021. Born in 1987 in Ethiopia, Robel Temesgen is currently a PhD fellow in Artistic Practice at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He received MFA from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art, University of Tromsø, Norway in 2015, and a BFA with Great distinction in Fine Art (Painting) from Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University in 2010. He took part in several fellowships and residencies, Junge Akademie Program of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and IASPIS, Stockholm, the Swedish Art Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Art are to mention a few. Temesgen’s work has been widely exhibited in international platforms in solo and group shows including ARoS Museum, Aarhus (2021), Para Site, Hong Kong (2021), Kunsthall Oslo (2019), Circle Art Agency, Nairobi (2019), Addis Foto Fest, Addis Ababa (2018), Modern Art Museum, Addis Ababa (2018), Tiwani Contemporary Art Gallery, London (2018), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2017), Marabouparken, Stockholm (2017), Nada Art Fair, Miami (2016), Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2016), TromsøKunstforening (2016), Tiwani Contemporary Art Gallery, London (2016), KurantVisningsrom, Tromsø (2015), Lumen Festival, New York (2015), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2014) and Modern Art Museum/GebreKristos Desta Center, Addis Ababa (2013). Aigerim Kapar is an independent curator, cultural activist, founder of the creative communication platform «Artcom ». Born in 1987 in Kazakhstan, lives and works in Astana. Aigerim curates and organizes exhibitions, city art interventions, discussions, lectures, workshops. Cooperates with art and educational institutions and scientific structures. In 2015, she founded in collaboration with the art community, the open platform “Artcom”. The platform brings together cultural figures to exchange experiences and find channels of interaction with society in order to develop and promote contemporary art and culture. In 2017, Aigerim initiated the Art Collider informal school – when art meets science. Where artists and scientists jointly conduct artistic studies, lectures and discussions on current topics. The results of the school are presented at exhibitions, publications and video materials. Jelica Jovanović (1983) is an architect and PhD student at the University of Technology in Vienna, working as an independent researcher. She graduated with a degree in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade. She is a founder and member of the NGO Grupa arhitekata, within which she has worked on several projects: Summer Schools of Architecture in Bač and Rogljevo (from 2010), (In)appropriate Monuments (ongoing from 2015), Lifting the Curtain (2014–2016, exhibited in Venice Bienale in 2014). She also coordinated the regional project Unfinished Modernisations for Association of Belgrade Architects (2010-2012) and worked as s curatorial assistant for the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) for the exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980. She is a twice-elected secretary general of DOCOMOMO Serbia , for which she is also working as a project coordinator and web editor. She is also the coauthor of the book Bogdan Bogdanović Biblioteka Beograd – An Architect’s Library with Wolfgang Thaler and Vladimir Kulić, as well as the coauthor of the web page Arhiva modernizma with LjubicaSlavković. She is also an OeAD One Month Visit scholar (Austria) and SAIA (Slovakia) scholar. Hu Yun is an artist currently based in Shanghai and Belgrade. In his practice, Hu Yun revisits historical moments in order to provide alternative readings, a process that also informs the artist’s self-reflection on his native and personal ties. His selected solo exhibitions include Image of Nature (Natural History Museum, London, 2010); Our Ancestors (Goethe Institute Shanghai, 2012); Lift with Care (2013) and Narration Sickness (2016) at AIKE Shanghai, and Another Diorama (2019, NUS Museum Singapore). His works have also been exhibited at the Power Station of Art (Shanghai), Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Cultural Centre of Belgrade, Para Site (Hong Kong) and Times Museum (Guangzhou). Hu Yun has also participated in the 4th Guangzhou Triennial (2012), 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), 6th Singapore Biennale (2019) and 10th Asia Pacific Triennial. He is the co-founder of art e-journal PDF (2012-2013). Larys Frogier has been the Director of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai since 2012.Since 2013, he has been the Chair of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART jury and he conceived this new award, exhibition and research program as an evolving platform to question Asia as a construction to investigate rather than a monolithic area or fixed identities. In 2020, he engaged the Rockbund Art Museum in the long term research program conceived by the independent curator Biljana Ciric As You Go… Roads Under Your Feet, Towards A New Future. In 2020, with Alfie Chua, he founded the duo artists Ocean & Wavz engaged in text, sound and image creation. Simona dvorák is an interdependent curator based in Paris. She develops projects on territories as Ile de France or Central and Eastern Europe. In her practice, she employs performative, sound and video formats, specific to the territorial and temporary context with the valorization of long-term collective work. She questions how we can create spaces of “communality” in the cultural sphere, notably as a curator within Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care (founded by Nataša Petresin Bachelez & Elena Sorokina). She works on creating frameworks for “exhibition processes” that allow us to share and generate knowledges to anticipate possible futures: antisexist, anti-racist, inclusive. These strategies are based on learning and unlearning as a decolonial methodology developed collectively in Nora Sternefeld’s doctoral research para-seminar at the HFBK in Hamburg, that she is part, as well as within CuratorLab dealing with practice of cultural “resistance”, a program led by Joanna Warsza at Konstfack in Stockholm. simona dvorák was also recently a fellow of program Art and Education in documenta fifteen in Kassel. She works now as a curatorial assistant on Walking with Water public program imagined by Biljana Ciric and Balkan Projects in relation to the Republic of Serbia Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Concurrently, she is in charge of programming at the Department of Cultural Development. Vladimir Radivojevic is street photographer from Bor. Passion towards photographic research he inherited from father. He is working with analog and digital photography since 2005. Vladimir participated in number of group exhibitions. Chef Qiu moved from Cambodia to Bor pursuing his ambition to open Chinese restaurant. Dr VišaTasić , engineer of electronics, employee of the Mining and Metallurgy Institute Bor Miloš Božić , member of the local community in Krivelj. Katica Radojković , a producer and seller of cheese at the local market in Bor Nemanja Stefanović , a student of communication and a member of the local youth theatre in Bor Nebojša Yamasaki Vukelić was born in 1986. in Belgrade, where he lives and works. He has received his MA in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 2021. His work is mostly focused on drawing, through which he deals the question of personal and collective capacities for social imagination. The notion of the end of the world is an important aspect in his work, both as a marker of anxieties experienced by individuals in current contexts, and as an expression of resistance to existing social, economic and political conditions. He has exhibited in numerous group shows, as well as a solo show – Inside it will all be soft and tender, at X Vitamin Gallery. He is one of the recipients of the drawing award of the Vladimir Veličković Fund in 2021, as well as the painting award “Miodrag Janjušević – academic painter”, the same year. BILJANA CIRIC is an interdependent curator Ciric is curator of the Pavilion of Republic of Serbia at 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 presenting with Walking with Water Solo exhibition of Vladimir Nikolic . She is conceiving inquiry for first Trans- Southeast Asian Triennial in Guang Zhou Repetition as a Gesture Towards Deep Listening (2021/2022) She was the co-curator of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, 2015), curator in residency at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, 2015), and a research fellow at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Høvikodden, 2016). Her recent exhibitions include An Inquiry: Modes of Encounter presented by Times Museum, Guang Zhou (2019); When the Other Meets the Other Other presented by Cultural Center Belgrade (2017); Proposals for Surrender presented by McAM in Shanghai (2016/2017); and This exhibition Will Tell You Everything About FY Art Foundations in FY Art Foundation space in Shen Zhen (2017). In 2013, Ciric initiated the seminar platform From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition Making with focus on China and Southeast Asia. The assembly platform was hosted by St Paul St Gallery, AUT, New Zealand (2013), Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2018), Times Museum, Guang Zhou (2019). The book with the same name was published by Sternberg Press in 2019 and was awarded best art publication in China in 2020. Her research on artists organized exhibitions in Shanghai was published in the book History in Making; Shanghai: 1979-2006 published by CFCCA; and Life and Deaths of Institutional Critique, co-edited by Nikita Yingqian Cai and published by Black Dog Publishing, among others. In 2018 she established the educa tional platform What Could/Should Curating Do? She was nominated for the ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award (2012). Currently she is developing a long-term project reflecting on China’s Belt and Road Initiative titled As you go . . . the roads under your feet, towards a new future. She is undertaking practice based PhD in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne. For more info please contact us Monika Husar: mokahusar@gmail.com Violeta Stojmenovic: sloterdajk@gmail.com

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