The 2nd edition of an interdisciplinary study program WHW Akademija for emerging artists has started beginning November 2019 in Zagreb.
The participants during the 2019/20 year are: Vlad Brăteanu (Bucharest), Dante Buu (Rožaje), Tin Dožić (Zagreb), Bianca Hisse (Tromsø/São Paulo), Neža Knez (Ljubljana), Jolanta Nowaczyk (Prague/Warsaw), Gaisha Madanova (Almaty), Ekaterina Muromtseva (Moscow), María Luisa Sanín Peña (Bogota/London), and Ivana Tkalčić (Zagreb).
The resident professors throughout this year’s program are David Maljković and Kate Sutton, as well as WHW as core faculty. The resident professors will collaboratively develop a mentoring program, hold regular meetings with the participants, and lead group and individual critique sessions. In addition, Sanja Iveković will conduct a masterclass for the participants on a monthly basis. Guest professors are Banu Cennetoğlu, DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti), and Manuel Pelmuş, who will each conduct a two-week workshop consisting of both collective work and individual critiques with the participants.
In between, a number of smaller-scale events such as masterclasses, collective guided walks, presentations, and research meetings take place.
This year program will be operating without permanent a studio space, instead the activities will migrate from the premises of WHW office and Gallery Nova toward public, institutional and other hybrid spaces in the Zagreb and outside of it, such as: collaborations with GMK, Zagreb and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, among others. WHW Akademija 2019/20 will explore a range of themes and forms that revolve around questions of liveness, performativity and movement in an exhibition context. The notion of periferic cultural situations will be used as a way to emphasize agility and adaptation and how the fact of limited resources and infrastructure can encourage ways to cut across conventional disciplines and welcome marginalized forms of knowledge production.
The program of WHW Akademija treats “learning by doing” as a crucial element in a dialogic educational process that encourages participants to actively co-produce critical content while emphasizing collective methods of co-learning. The program will enrol various programs such as exhibitions, performances open to the public within the framework of series of public events Evening with WHW Akademija.
WHW Akademija is realized in partnership with the Kontakt Collection, that focuses on experimental and neo-avant-garde art in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe from the late 1950s onwards, thus the program will also include seminars based on the works and artistic practices of the Kontakt Collection.
