‍Monday - Saturday, 24/10 - 29/10 2022, 5 – 8 p.m.
Gallery Nova, Teslina 7

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Darko Aleksovski, Željko Beljan, Diana Cantarey, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Maksym Khodak, Nadežda Kirćanski, Stela Mikulin, Ruoru Mou, Kristina Pashkova, Christian Sleiman, Bojan Stojčić, Huda Takriti 

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Starting from Monday 24 October, this year’s WHW Akademija participants will open the bar (a Base for Artistic Research), in Gallery Nova from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., where you are invited to visit their exhibition in progress and join public events. The programme is developed with the mentoring support of this year’s resident professor Ivana Bago.

‍ONGOING:

The bar – daily from 5 p.m. – 8 p.m.

The bar was initially conceived by Bojan Stojčić to be a place of gathering and later extended to be both a conceptual and physical structure that will support the different activities and works during this week. Eventually, the bar became a shorthand for Base for Artistic Research. The bar menu will include twelve special cocktails created by the participants as a reflection on their own practices.

Exhibition in Progress, curated by Maksym Khodak and Nadežda Kirćanski

The exhibition is imagined as an accumulative framework evolving during the week-long programme, and including both the artworks by the WHW Akademija participants and traces from the ongoing public events and group gatherings. It is built around the idea of the bar as a bare structure that will uphold the creation of a modular, flexible, fluid, and ongoing social space of gathering, collaboration and participation. In this sense, it questions these hybrid practices and the different ways in which they can constitute an exhibition. Accordingly, the exhibition is based on the presence in the gallery space and is treated as a collaborative work – an exhibition-in-progress and a habitat of artistic research, with individual inputs of each of the participants, where the actual experience happens in the process of constant shifting and negotiating between the individual and collective.

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PUBLIC EVENTS:

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Monday 24th October
6 p.m. – 8 p.m.

Table Tennis Table, intervention by Željko Beljan

Table Tennis Table is an intervention that takes the form and rules of a standard table tennis game, but subverts its availability and function by placing obstacles which can be rearranged in order to make the game harder or easier. The idea is for these obstacles to erase the borders between table tennis players with or without prior experience, in a way that makes every player equal. The table will not be fixed in one place, but will occupy different indoor and outdoor spaces during the week-long programme. 

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Tuesday, 25th October
6 p.m. – 7 p.m.

‍Speed Dating, facilitated by Stela Mikulin

A proposition to create a social situation using certain rules within the inhabited space, where the viewers can openly discuss the seen works and build up traces and converse – not only with the participants but among themselves as well – about artistic processes and experiences.  

The limitation of time and space is an experiment with the aim to lose the potentially anxious small-talk situations amongst strangers in an after-show set up. This is not about finding romance, but there will be some passion going around.

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Wednesday, 26th October
5 p.m. – 8 p.m.

Collective Weaving, facilitated by Kristina Pashkova and Željko Beljan

Kristina and Željko both use different methods of weaving in their artistic practices. The proposal to host a collective weaving session which invites the audience to participate and collaborate, is in that sense an extension of their own artistic interests. The session is open for people to try weaving and working with different collected materials. The collective tapestry resulting from the workshop will be on view at the exhibition space.

Please bring some materials you wish to add to the tapestry, in addition to the threads we will provide, if they are available to you. This can include: old pieces of fabric, yarns & ribbons, as well as different personal objects (old photos, keys, wood branches, etc.). 

Registration for the workshop is open until 23rd October at ana.kovacic.whw@gmail.com

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Thursday, 27th October
7 p.m.

Evenings with WHW Akademija
Back to Square Zero - A Study in Unguaranteed Movement, a public lecture by Ivana Bago 

Contemporary art is increasingly defined in epistemic terms, as an (exceptional) mode of research and knowledge production, which is at the same time (unexceptionally) immersed in the extractivist logic of global capitalism and the knowledge industries that sustain it. In a constellation in which the line between insurrectionary knowledge and its systemic absorption and digestion is all but impossible to draw and navigate, what and how is there left to teach and to know? What is, furthermore, the curriculum that trains the young students of art for the world marked by incessant experiences of destruction and threats of global extinction? The lecture will situate these questions within the context of WHW Akademija, and especially the module Back to Square Zero — A Study in Non-Guaranteed Movement, which was conceived as a blank syllabus, with a hand-made copy of Malevich’s Black Square hung on a ceiling and used as the only premeditated point of departure. The talk itself is imagined as a preface to a discussion of this year’s experience of WHW Akademija, as well as its future potentials, between the participants, the organizers, and the public. 

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Friday, 28th October
5 p.m. – 8 p.m.

Video Screening Programme followed by a Q&A Session, curated by Diana Cantarey and Christian Sleiman

The video screening consists of a selection of moving image works by this year’s participants and their ecosystems. The screening will be divided into a one-off event and a selection of works constantly on view during the bar’s open hours. 

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Works that will be shown within the screening programme:  Becoming a Crane by Ruoru Mou, Hüzün is a tranny name by Nihat Karataşlı with Gani_met, Refusing to Meet Your Eye by Huda Takriti, First war kinda nervous by Maksym Khodak, Water made to move by Adrijana Gvozdenović and Vijai Patchineelam, and baskOm 💦 by TrOpical Tap Water ☀️. The public screening will be followed by a conversation with the artists in the bar. 

‍Works shown during open hours: Here lies the Hare by Bojan Stojčić, 🍉 wAtermelon bOat 🍉 by TrOpical Tap Water 💦, Recipe for an apple jam Between Anxiety and Hope by Adrijana Gvozdenović, Institute of National Memory by Maksym Khodak, A Horizon Which Cannot Be Seen, but Can Be Imagined by Darko Aleksovski, Les Yeux Dans Les Yeux by Huda Takriti, All anxieties wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning by Stela Mikulin, Climate Outskirt by Maksym Khodak, The Wind Up Bird by Ruoru Mou and vrhovec 38 by Željko Beljan.

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Saturday, 29th October
6 p.m.

There is a man looking at a flower – a collective performance by WHW participants, coordinated by Ruoru Mou

Initially developed by WHW participants during the workshop with Vlatka Horvat at the Summer School in Zagreb, the collective performance explores a dialogue between bodies, objects, and space. Together the participants will challenge the language that escaped our mother tongue, the way memory functions, the imagined and imaginable. Built during the time they have spent together, this is a recollection of what is, was, has been or may have been.

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GROUP GATHERINGS

To continue their process of learning together and sharing and practicing together, some activities are imagined to be shared only between the participants and the WHW Akademija team. Notes, references and other kinds of traces and outcomes of these processes will be left in the space, accumulating during the whole week.

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Collective Cooking by Christian Sleiman

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Some anxieties and the world by Adrijana Gvozdenović

Some anxieties and the world is a card reading about artistic anxieties, designed for artists and researchers in 2019, adapted in relation to WHW Akademija final week programme.

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Zine Workshop, proposed and facilitated by Darko Aleksovski, Ruoru Mou and Kristina Pashkova 

The zine workshop will be developed through a couple of working sessions which are designed as an extension of the shared interests and practices of working with paper, artists’ books, zines, drawings etc.

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When monsters arise, workshop for a horror shadow play facilitated by Diana Cantarey and Adrijana Gvozdenović

The workshop for a horror shadow play is imagined to be a session of storytelling, an invocation that will allow both mythical and institutional monsters to inhabit the space, to enter the bar. 

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Critical Beauty Salon, feedback session facilitated by Adrijana Gvozdenović, Christian Sleiman and Kristina Pashkova

Critical Beauty Salon is a proposal for reflecting on and discussing different activities that took place during the week and sharing it with a group in the setting of an improvised beauty salon. 

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Dear Art, this song is for you ❤️
A Karaoke Night which is intended as a sing-along love letter for the time spent together. 

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Graphic design team: Christian Sleiman & Bojan Stojčić‍

Writing team: Darko Aleksovski, Diana Cantarey, Nadežda Kirćanski, and Huda Takriti 

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