The program of the 4th edition of WHW Akademija, an experimental, interdisciplinary, tuition-free art study program, starts in March and lasts until November 2022. It combines live and digital sessions, starting online in March and April and intensifying in May with a physical summer school that will take place in an outdoor location in Croatia. The programme continues online until the end of October 2022, when the final meeting of participants will take place in Zagreb.
The year is focused on the notion of artistic ecologies that can foster interdisciplinary practice and cooperation, stimulate ideas, and engage communities.
This year, WHW Akademija received a record number of over 300 inspiring applications from around the world. The 2022 program includes twelve participants: Darko Aleksovski (Veles), Željko Beljan (Zagreb/Vukovar), Diana Cantarey (Amsterdam/Mexico City), Adrijana Gvozdenović (Podgorica), Maksym Khodak (Kyiv), Nadežda Kirćanski (Belgrade), Stela Mikulin (Zaprešić), Ruoru Mou (London/Florence), Kristina Pashkova (Moscow), Christian Sleiman (Beirut), Bojan Stojčić (Sarajevo), and Huda Takriti (Vienna/Damascus).
Members of the professorial team are: Ivana Bago, Zbyněk Baladrán, Tim Etchells, Vlatka Horvat, Pablo Martínez, and Daniela Ortiz, as well as Yael Davids, iLiana Fokianaki, and Leire Vergara, who are participating in the public program Evenings with WHW Akademija.
The fourth edition of WHW Akademija sets up a model that combines online and offline encounters to explore participatory modes of artistic and knowledge production.
Vlatka Horvat will explore dialogic encounters through her BETWEEN US online seminar in April and continuing during the summer school in Zagreb, spanning solo and two-person performative tasks, collaborative assignments, rule- and chance-based frameworks and structures for improvisation, and practical problem-solving. Pablo Martínez’s summer school seminar, Exercises of Institutional Imagination: Toward an Eco-socialist Museum, will discuss the possibilities of the eco-social museum as well as the limits and unsustainability of the modern cultural paradigm. This year’s resident professor is Ivana Bago, whose tenure will begin with a summer school mentoring program titled Back to Square Zero, developed in collaboration with the participants. The program will also include an April masterclass with Tim Etchells, based on a set of exercises,experiments, and conversations focused on making, observing, and refining thepossibilities of performance improvisation. Two shorter seminars will be led by Daniela Ortiz in June and Zbyněk Baladrán in September. The program runs until November 2022.
WHW Akademija is realized in partnership with the Kontakt Art Collection, focused on experimental and neo-avant-garde art activities in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe from the late 1950s onward. The manifold artistic positions included in the Kontakt Art Collection serve as one of the foundations for the WHW Akademija curriculum.
The program is supported by:
Kontakt Collection / ERSTE Foundation
Foundation for Arts Initiatives
European Cultural Foundation
City Office for Culture, International Relations and Civil Society
Kultura Nova Foundation
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
Trust for Mutual Understanding