Remember Freedom, WHW Akademija 2025 starting 

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WHW Akademija program for 2025 is titled „Remember Freedom“ and is borrowed from a speech given by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Award reception in 2014. Eleven  years ago, she urged society to face up to the difficult times that were then on the horizon and have now arrived, and, in doing so, not to forget the freedom held by poets and artists - "the realists of a larger reality".

Thematically and methodologically, the program addresses questions that seem to be in opposition - poetry and borders. Together with the participants and numerous invited guests, we will investigate physical and metaphorical borderlands and the role they have performed historically and in the present. What makes this pertinent here today, when the empire normalizes extreme violence outside of its core, is that the borderlands of Europe, such as Croatia, offer a unique perspective to consider the formation of whiteness and its strategies of inclusion and exclusion. Contrary to the populist idea of an impenetrable fortress wall, we understand the border as a site of exchange, complexity, negotiation and discovery. Nevertheless, borders have become places where war and extreme violence are normalized, where genders and identities are policed, and where empathy and solidarity go to die. 

At the seemingly opposite pole, poetry seems to have become ubiquitous in the art world. It serves as a signal of philosophy, a connection to the contemplative and metaphysical, and a response to the disdain for the promotional language that dominates the art world. We see the turn of contemporary art towards poetry as a response to the centrality of the affective and personal in contemporary theory and criticism, protests, and the digital sphere. Potentially, it also reflects a fundamental desire for political engagement that is today thwarted by the representative democratic system, online media, and authoritarian financial interests. 

The question of the relationality between concrete borders and the abstract freedom of poetry is one we want to explore together, as antagonism, as a counterbalance, and as different aspects of the intimate treatment of bodies trying (and failing) to cross.

The program started in April 2025 and runs through November 2025, launching with online sessions in April, before convening a first in-person intensive: gathering in Zagreb and Bihać from 5 to 13^th of May. Bihać has always been a border city, since Ottoman/Habsburg rivalries, with a heavy history both during WWII and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Located close to the Croatian border, today it is one of the key points in the attempts of migrants to enter the EU and the location of two EU-funded migrant camps. The program in Bihać is realized in collaboration with the Center for Contemporary Culture KRAK and the program continues online until mid-October 2025, when the participants will once more reconvene in Zagreb.

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The program in 2025 includes twelve participants: Varduhi Balyan, Karla Crnčević, Larisa Crunțeanu, Nevena Delić, Katarina Gotić Damiani, Anima Goyal, Monika Katarzyna Łukasik, Alisa Oleva, Nevena Savić, Ezra Šimek, Behshad Tajammol and Petar Vranjković.

As in previous years, WHW Akademija program works with participants on new forms of self-determination based on critical reflection and curiosity, and supports this through encounters with artists, artworks, arts professionals, scholars, and practitioners from various disciplines. All members of WHW serve as resident professors, with additional guest professors and lecturers invited in from different disciplines.

Throughout the program, besides working with WHW in group and individual modes, the programme will deepen the connection with the Kontakt collection, which is our partner. The Kontakt Collection focuses on Central, Eastern and Southeastern European artistic activity and its relations to social and political developments since the late 1950s. By emphasising the power of artworks to process historical burdens and manipulations, this collection amplifies how artists actively seek allyship and claim agency through self-organized infrastructures, which is crucial to analyse and rework in today’s conditions. Through a focus on artists and works from the Kontakt collection, participants will have intensive contact with past artistic endeavours which are not part of widely taught art history. 

WHW Akademija offers localized knowledge of the region, its artists and (hi)stories, as well as its political urgencies. It aims to escape the regime of total visibility and competitiveness, by offering a framework for artistic work that is not about inclusion in the art system, but a critical and propositional challenge to the image/role of art and the system in which it operates. WHW Akademija takes its autonomy seriously and we believe it is a safe space for emerging artists and all other participants involved, while also encouraging risk-taking with its autonomous trajectories collectively shaped and defended.

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RESIDENT PROFESSORS:

What, How and for Whom / WHW and Ana Kovačić

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VISITING PROFESSORS:

Emina Bužinkić

Ayesha Hameed

Saodat Ismailova

Belinda Kazeem - Kamiński

KRAK (members and guests: Irfan Hošić, Mehmed Mahmutović, Adnan Suljkanović, Dino Dupanović and Nermin Duraković)

Bojan Mucko and Marijana Hameršak / Project European Regime of Irregularized Migrations on the Periphery, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
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Special thanks to the GMK Gallery, Zagreb; KRAK, Bihać; New Spaces of Culture, Zagreb; Multimedia Institute Mama, Zagreb

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The main funder of WHW Akademija is Kontakt Collection /  ERSTE Foundation.

WHW Akademija is supported by:

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City Office for Culture and Civil Society

 FfAI – Foundation for Arts Initiatives
Kultura Nova Foundation
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
Trust for Mutual Understanding (TMU)‍

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