Join WHW Akademija’s 2024 cohort for a program of workshops, screenings, and performances centered around the theme of care and community with WHW Akademija participants: Željka Aleksić, Damir Avdagić, Sanda Črnelč, Haonan He, Vismayee Karande, Gaia De Megni, Nominis, Aslı Özdoyuran, Andrés Matías Pinilla, Emily Roderick, Áron Rossman-Kiss, Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty

‍When the Bough Breaks, presented by WHW Akademija´s twelve participants, proposes a series of interventions that articulate, ponder about and analyze the concept of care. By looking at the stereotypes and complexities associated with the term, the participants of WHW Akademija pose questions about what care means, how a community is built and what it means to collaborate.

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The public program includes two events:

Tuesday 22/10 2024, 6 pm – Youth Cultural Center Ribnjak, Park Ribnjak 1

Public events curated by the participants will start on Tuesday, October 22, with the screening of The Task by Leigh Ledare, curated by Damir Avdagić. Ledare’s 2017 film The Task comprises an intervention into a renowned method of experimental social psychology initially developed in the 1950s at London’s Tavistock Institute. Ledare began by staging an immersive three-day Group Relations conference—an intricate feedback apparatus designed to surface and reflect upon unconscious group phenomena. During a sequence of small and large group encounters, the group enacts a temporary institution whose purpose is to study itself—an abstract ‘task’ that allows participants to examine the identities, roles, desires and biases that individuals import into the group, as well as the emergence of conscious and unconscious group dynamics. Before the screening, Damir Avdagić will give a brief introduction to the field of group dynamics.

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Saturday 26/10 2024, 6 pm - Croatian School Museum Gallery, Hebrangova 5

The week will conclude with a series of interventions and the launch of a zine at the gallery of the Croatian School Museum on Saturday, October 26, at 18:00. Among the actions, Nominis will encourage everyone to get their hands dirty in a ritual of togetherness and simultaneous helplessness/helpfulness. Join by sticking together with the stickiness of fresh nail polish and get your nails painted by someone, paint someone else’s nails, or hold a drink for someone while their polish dries. This intervention stages a situation of vulnerability and care, self-care and awareness of our body in space. Works on view in the space will include a collaborative installation by Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty, as well as Andrés Matías Pinilla´s work Squat a Pharmaceutical Factory, a drawing and visual essay, in which the artist explores the notion of ‘care’ as a radical collective process, as a psycho-spiritual state, and as a potential escape route from the structures that shape artistic activity under neoliberal logic. It is presented as rebellious heraldry, where the first of the texts is a poem that celebrates festivity and dance as powerful processes of alchemical reconfiguration within the context of a rave in the ruins of Medika, an old pharmaceutical factory in Zagreb.

The zine will be published and assembled on-site in response to the overall theme of care. One subsection will be dedicated to a collective conversation around nursery rhymes, as a means of care that has been historically instrumentalized by dictatorial and colonial regimes to convey specific messages to the masses. It is from one such nursery rhyme that the week’s program takes its title.

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In the second half of the sixth generation, WHW Akademija has evolved as a process of collaborative and reciprocal learning, facilitated by seminars led by farid rakun (GUDSKUL) and Françoise Vergès, but also by the twelve selected participants, whose individual commitments have unfolded over time into an investigation of collectivity and the common. The final week of WHW Akademija offers both a presentation and continuation of this process, a temporary platform for themes, questions, and thoughts on collectivity and non-collectivity accumulated through online and onsite workshops, lectures, seminars, meetings, group chats, and collectively edited documents.

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WHW Akademija is realized in partnership with Kontakt Collection. The collection focuses 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 will serve as a point of departure and stimulus for the interdisciplinary approach of WHW Akademija, which bridges divisions between theory and practice.

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

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The 2024 program was realized in conjunction with the collaborative project Care ecologies, organized between WHW, G&A Mamidakis Foundation, State of Concept Athens and Idensitat.

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Special thanks to the Croatian School Museum.

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WHW Akademija is supported by:

City Office for Culture and Civil Society

Kultura Nova Foundation

Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia

Trust for Mutual Understanding (TMU)‍

Creative Europe Programme of the European Union