Following the guest teaching project 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.
Under the title of their overall teaching engagement at the Academy of Fine Arts The secret is that there is no secret, the public lecture looks 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.
As part of their teaching assignment, Ilić and Ćurlin will specifically address institutions in Vienna and Austria that have showcased artistic practices from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CEE): “We will go beyond the ideological framework of a West-East division and focus on the impacts of colonial and imperialist relationships as well as connections between different geographies.” Curatorial projects developed together with students and realized in the form of exhibitions or other formats will make previously little-explored levels of exhibition practice visible and provide an analysis of their political impacts.
The two-year teaching assignment at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, supported by the ERSTE Foundation, promotes educational programmes that make knowledge about the theory and practice of art in former Eastern Europe accessible. The support of the ERSTE Foundation is provided on the occasion of 20 years of Kontakt Collection.
Header image: Škart collective, Wakeuppers, protest-poetry-diary, January -….2025
