Remember Freedom, WHW Akademija 2026
Under the title Remember Freedom, the eighth edition of WHW Akademija features twelve participants: Betül Aksu, Ines Borovac, Farah Hasanbegović, Ioana Lupascu, Klodiana Millona, Esteban Prudencio, Mia Ribić, Maša Seničić, Hana Selena Sokolović, Abd Tammaa, Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, and Paula Tončić.
As resident professor in 2026, curator Sebastian Cichocki will develop a series of (mostly) wordless acts and exercisesinspired by the methodologies of Oskar Hansen and the artistic duo KwieKulik,exploring Open Form as a participatory and emancipatory process between artist and audience. Conceived as a small congress on “poetry in action,” he will reinterpret these approaches through gestures, materials, and collective experiments, while also hosting online guest speakers and conversations, culminating in a final gathering in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Participants will also have a chance to work with artist Selma Selman in her hometown of Bihać. Selman’s multidisciplinary practice includes performance, video,painting, and installation, often rooted in autobiographical narratives that confront social injustice, gender-based violence, and systemic discrimination.
Additionally, the visiting professorial team for WHW Akademija 2026 includes a number of theorists, poets, cultural workers, and scholars such as Emina Bužinkić, Monika Herceg, Marijana Hameršak and Bojan Mucko (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research Zagreb), Basyma Saad, and members of KRAK, among others.
The title of this year’s program, Remember Freedom, is borrowed from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 2014 National Book Award speech, in which she urged society to confront difficult times without forgetting the freedom of artists—“the realists of a larger reality.” Thematically and methodologically, the program, just as in 2025, addresses questions that seem to be in opposition: poetry and borders. Together with the participants, we will investigate the notion of 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 from which to consider the formation of whiteness and its strategies of inclusion and exclusion. At the seemingly opposite pole, poetry has become ubiquitous in the art world 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 artworld. 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. The question of the relationality between concrete borders and the abstract freedom of poetry is one we want to explore together, as antagonism, as counterbalance and as different aspects of the intimate treatment of bodies trying (and failing) to cross.
The program launched in April 2026, beginning with online sessions before convening a first in-person intensive gathering in Zagreb from May 21-30, 2026. An exhibition presenting participants works will take place from May 22 to June 6 at the Ko:ke Studio.
The second part of the program is scheduled from October 4-11, 2026. It is framed around a visit to Bihać — a border city shaped by Ottoman/Habsburg rivalries, with a loaded history during both World War II and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Located close to the Croatian border, today it is one of the key points where migrants attempt to enter the European Union, as well as the location of two EU-funded migrant camps. The program in Bihać is realized in collaboration with the Center for Contemporary Culture KRAK.
Throughout the program, WHW Akademija will deepen the connection with the program’s partner, Kontakt Collection. This unique initiative focuses on Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European artistic activity and its relations to social and political developments since the late 1950s. By emphasizing 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 analyze and rework in today’s conditions.
Special thanks to the Ko:ke Studio,Zagreb; KRAK, Bihać; Croatian Architects' Association (UHA), Zagreb; The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb; Ribnjak Youth Center, Zagreb; and POGON Jedinstvo, Zagreb.
The main partner of WHW Akademija is Kontakt Collection / ERSTE Foundation.
WHW Akademija is supported by:
City Office forCulture and Civil Society
FfAI – Foundation for Arts Initiatives
Kultura Nova Foundation
Ministry of Culture and Mediaof the Republic of Croatia
Trust for MutualUnderstanding (TMU)