WHW at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 2024–2026
In cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and ERSTE Foundation, Kontakt initiated a course at the Academy that points out new pathways of teaching and learning based on the experimental pedagogical approaches of Eastern Europe’s neo-avant-garde.
Following the guest professorship of Adam Szymczyk from 2019 to 2021, the Croatian curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, presented by Ivet Ćurlin and Nataša Ilić, was selected to teach as guest lecturers at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna during the academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26. In 2024, members of WHW Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović were appointed as directors of the 2027 Skulptur Projekte in Münster.
The title of their overall teaching engagement at the Academy of Fine Arts is "The secret is that there is no secret", looking at the relationship between curating and politics and the clash between ambitiously radical exteriority of institutional and curatorial posturing and interiority of unaccounted practices of discrimination and exclusion. By focusing specifically on practices in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, it proposes strategies that go beyond aesthetic of display that are supposed to suggest reconciliation and transcending of national borders, and looks at the impact of the colonial and imperialist relationships between different geographies.
Following the guest professorship of Adam Szymczyk from 2019 to 2021, the Croatian curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, presented by Ivet Ćurlin and Nataša Ilić, was selected to teach as guest lecturers at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna during the academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26. In 2024, members of WHW Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović were appointed as directors of the 2027 Skulptur Projekte in Münster.
The title of their overall teaching engagement at the Academy of Fine Arts is "The secret is that there is no secret", looking at the relationship between curating and politics and the clash between ambitiously radical exteriority of institutional and curatorial posturing and interiority of unaccounted practices of discrimination and exclusion. By focusing specifically on practices in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, it proposes strategies that go beyond aesthetic of display that are supposed to suggest reconciliation and transcending of national borders, and looks at the impact of the colonial and imperialist relationships between different geographies.