After the intense WHW Akademija summer school program with workshops and collective exercises, the fifth edition of WHW Akademija is continuing by hosting an online seminar and public event featuring the writer and curator Miguel A. López.

On Tuesday, June 27, 2023 at 2 pm CET join us on zoom platform for the online public lecture Letter to Cecilia Vicuña by Miguel A. López.

Combining the memories related to his friendship with the artist Cecilia Vicuña and the reflections on her work, this lecture introduces Vicuña’s sharp creative practice in the form of a letter addressed to the artist. Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker, and activist whose works explore language, memory, dissolution, extinction, and exile. Central to her practice are the pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity. The presentation Letter to Cecilia Vicuña shares Miguel A. López’s intimate perspective on working with Vicuña over many years, as well as the impact of her visceral entanglements between words and seed, sound and thread, quipu and blood.

‍Miguel A. López will also lead a seminar with the participants of WHW Akademija 2023 entitled Dissident Fictions in the Land of Misogyny. This two-session seminar will look at the various recent intersections between visual culture and transfeminist struggles in Latin America, as well as artistic forms of challenging the male-dominated public realm of cultural production. This includes exploring the work of artists and activists such as the late philosopher, drag queen, and activist Giuseppe Campuzano who founded the Transvestite Museum (2003-2013), the Maya Kachiquel indigenous painter Rosa Elena Curruchich, and the queer performer Naomí Rincón Gallardo.  

‍WHW Akademija is set up as an education model that combines online and physical encounters and explores participatory modes of artistic and knowledge production.Through collaborative exercises, seminars, presentations, discussions, workshops, and collective actions, it initiates an intense exchange between the participants, the professorial team, and the local setting.

‍Miguel A. López is a writer and curator. In his practice, he focuses on the role of art in politics and public life, collective work and collaborative dynamics, and queer and feminist rewritings of history. He is the Curator for the 2024 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art. From 2015 to 2020, he worked as Chief curator, and later Co-director at TEOR/éTica, Costa Rica. In 2019, he curated the retrospective exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure at the Witte de With (now Kunstinstituut Melly), Rotterdam, which traveled to Mexico City, Madrid, and Bogota. Other recent curatorial projects include Sila Chanto & Belkis Ramírez: Aquí me quedo / Here I Stay en el ICA-VCU, Richmond (2022), Hard To Swallow. Anti-Patriarchal Poetics and New Scene in the Nineties at ICPNA, Lima (2021), And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers? at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2021), and 21 Bienal de Arte Contemporânea SESC_Videobrasil. Comunidades Imaginadas at SESC, São Paulo (2019). He is the author of Ficciones disidentes en la tierra de la misoginia [Dissident Fictions in the Land of Misogyny] (2019), and co-editor of The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War (2017). His texts have been published in journals such as Afterall, Artforum, e-flux Journal, Art in America, Journal of Visual Culture, Manifesta Journal. He was a recipient of the 2016 ICI's Independent Vision Curatorial Award.

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‍WHW Akademija is an independent, tuition-free, interdisciplinary study program for emerging artists, founded in 2018 and realized in partnership with the Kontakt Collection, which focuses on experimental and neo-avant-garde art in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. As in previous years, the 2023 program remains focused on strategies that take art practices from the Kontakt Collection as a point of departure and a source of inspiration.

The main funders of WHW Akademija are Kontakt Collection / ERSTE Foundation and the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.

WHW Akademija is supported by:
Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
Foundation Kultura nova
City Office for Culture, Intercity and International Relations, and Civil Society
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
Trust for Mutual Understanding