WHW Akademija Open Call 2025 – REMEMBER FREEDOM
What, How & for Whom / WHW launches its annual open call for WHW Akademija. The program for 2025 is titled Remember Freedom and is borrowed from a speech given by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Award reception in 2014. 10 years ago, she urged society to face up to the difficult times that were then on the horizon and have now arrived, and, in doing so, not to forget the freedom held by poets and artists – “the realists of a larger reality”.
Applications for the seventh year of this tuition-free transdisciplinary study program are now invited. The program is open to artists based anywhere while focusing on artistic practices primarily grounded in the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe. The program works with participants on new forms of self-determination based on critical reflection and curiosity, and supports this through encounters with artists, artworks, arts professionals, scholars, and practitioners from various disciplines. All members of WHW collective serve as resident professors, with additional guest professors and lecturers invited in from different disciplines.
Thematically and methodologically, the program will address questions that seem to be in opposition – poetry and borders. Together with the participants, we will investigate physical and metaphorical borderlands and the role they have performed historically and in the present. What makes this pertinent here today, when the empire normalizes extreme violence outside of its core, is that the borderlands of Europe, such as Croatia, offer a unique perspective to consider the formation of whiteness and its strategies of inclusion and exclusion. Borders have become places where war and extreme violence are normalized, where genders and identities are policed, and where empathy and solidarity go to die. Nevertheless, and contrary to the populist idea of an impenetrable fortress wall, we understand the border as a site of exchange, complexity, negotiation, and discovery.
At the seemingly opposite pole, poetry has become ubiquitous in the art world as a signal of philosophy, a connection to the contemplative and metaphysical, and a response to the disdain for the promotional language that dominates the art world. We see the turn of contemporary art towards poetry as a response to the centrality of the affective and personal in contemporary theory and criticism, protests, and the digital sphere. Potentially, it also reflects a fundamental desire for political engagement that is today thwarted by the representative democratic system, online media and authoritarian financial interests. The question of the relationality between concrete borders and the abstract freedom of poetry is one we want to explore together, as antagonism, as a counterbalance, and as different aspects of the intimate treatment of bodies trying (and failing) to cross.
The program will be held both online and through two physical encounters: one visit to Zagreb, Croatia, and one visit to both Zagreb and Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The latter is realized in collaboration with the Center for Contemporary Culture KRAK. Bihać has always been a border city, since Ottoman/Habsburg rivalries, with a heavy history both during WWII and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Located close to the Croatian border, today it is one of the key points in the attempts of migrants to enter the EU and the location of two EU-funded migrant camps. The program in both cities will include cultural workers, theorists, researchers, and activists working on borders and migration.
Throughout the program, besides working with WHW in group and individual modes, the programme will deepen the connection with the Kontakt collection, which is our partner. The Kontakt Collection focuses on Central, Eastern and Southeastern European artistic activity and its relations to social and political developments since the late 1950s. By emphasising the power of artworks to process historical burdens and manipulations, this collection amplifies how artists actively seek allyship and claim agency through self-organized infrastructures, which is crucial to analyse and rework in today’s conditions. Through a focus on artists and works from the Kontakt collection, participants will have intensive contact with past artistic endeavours which are not part of widely taught art history. Alongside access to this study collection, the programme will include visits to artists´ studios, galleries and museums, especially during the times in Zagreb, when participants will be encouraged to connect to a range of local cultural actors.
WHW Akademija offers localized knowledge of the region, its artists and (hi)stories, as well as its political urgencies. It aims to escape the regime of total visibility and competitiveness, by offering a framework for artistic work that is not about inclusion in the art system, but a critical and propositional challenge to the image/role of art and the system in which it operates. WHW Akademija takes its autonomy seriously and we believe it is a safe space for emerging artists and all other participants involved, while also encouraging risk-taking with its autonomous trajectories collectively shaped and defended.
Timeline and application
The program starts in April 2025 and runs through November 2025, launching with online sessions in April, before convening a first in-person gathering in Zagreb and Bihać in May. The program continues online until the mid-October 2025, when the participants will once more reconvene in Zagreb.
Application deadline: February 28, 2025
Interviews: March 10-14, 2025, online
Final status notification: by the end of March 2025
First in person session in Zagreb and Bihać: May 5 -14, 2025
Second in person session: October 2025
Online participation schedule will be announced in April 2025 for chosen participants.
Practical information
WHW Akademija is open for international participants. It is open to individuals who are still in the formative stages of developing an independent artistic practice and are seeking to deepen their artistic, theoretical, and critical skills. We encourage applications from those interested in the proposed topics. Applicants must commit to the full assigned schedule. The working language of WHW Akademija is English.
Tuition and costs
WHW Akademija is a tuition-free program. Program-related costs (including accommodation) in Zagreb and Bihać will be covered by WHW. Travel costs to and from Croatia will be reimbursed.
How to apply
Please submit applications only through the application form below. Applications must be received by February 28th, 2025 and include the following information:
• CV
• short biography (250 words max.)
• statement about your work (2 pages max.)
• one PDF portfolio (15 pages max.) containing work descriptions, images with captions, and links to media hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud.
Please title all your files according to the following formulation: “Last name, first name[_CV / _biography /_statement / _portfolio].”
Candidates are selected based on merit as well as their application’s relevance to this year’s thematic framework. The program is open to applicants from all countries with priority to artists coming from Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe. For additional questions, please contact ana.kovacic.whw@gmail.com, or visit the website.
