a team of curators named after an exhibition take Istanbul Biennial

Three basic questions, four curators and a continuous requestioning of the social and political circumstances of our age, as well as the artists’ position in the labor market - WHW gains international recognition, without forgetting significant issues closer to home.

With the coming of the year 2000 Zagreb experienced a distinct change from the war and corruption burdened nineties - local elections ousted from power the Croatian Democratic Union, the hard-line nationalist party that marked the decade, and a sigh of relief could be felt among my peers. This time coincided with an exhibition that consequently proved to be seminal for both the up-and-coming and the already established but often taken for granted generations of artists, and also for the team that curated it. Commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, its title 'What, How & for Whom' posed the three basic questions of every economic organization that also concern the planning, concept and realization of exhibitions, as well as the production and distribution of artworks or artists’ position at the labor market. These three questions became the motto and name of the collective consisting of the four curators Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić . Instrumentality of social capital in constituting the social post-socialist reality turned out to be a matrix for the development of all of WHW's projects and their internal and external operations. Discussing relevant social issues, the process of normalization in this region of transition and era of gentrification, collaboration, artistic production, education.

Since May 2003 WHW has been directing the program of Gallery Nova - a non-profit, city owned gallery in Zagreb. Its programs include not only exhibitions, but also lectures and public discussions conducted by international artists, curators and cultural theoreticians, publications, a book edition on contemporary cultural practice and cultural theory, regular gallery newspapers, radio broadcasts and interventions, screenings.... the list just goes on.

WHW may be a key operator in Zagreb, where it has successfully collaborated with many principal individuals, institutions and independent cultural organizations - including co-founding and participating in the collaborative platform Zagreb - Cultural Kapital of Europe 3000, but from its early beginnings the team has worked internationally with numerous lectures, seminars and workshops under their belt, perhaps most notably curating the 'Collective Creativity' exhibition at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany in 2005.
Two hot topics prompted me to write about WHW this month. One close to home and indicative of past and present social and political circumstances in Croatia, the other of international impact, and because of its prominence in the art world, unavoidable.

After bringing the artwork of Vojin Bakić - one of the key sculptors of former Yugoslavia - back into the spotlight with the 2007 exhibition of his work, WHW has recently teamed up with the artist's granddaughter Ana Martina Bakić in making a public appeal for the preservation of one of his landmark sculptures, a 37 meter concrete and steel monument celebrating the anti-fascist struggle of WWII, a magnificent edifice that has survived the early 1990's, unlike Bakić's other public artwork that was cut up and recycled, blown up or simply dismantled at a time his Serbian heritage was deemed undesirable. Local media has picked up on the issue, but no word yet if state officials, de jure responsible for the devastation of the monument, have taken notice.

On a more international level, WHW has been announced as the team curating the 11th International Istanbul Biennial, taking place from the 12th of September to the 8th of November 2009. A city that has shot up from 3 million inhabitants three decades ago, to today's estimated 15 million has long outgrown its infrastructure. Many different interests are concentrated on a small territory of wildly germinating urban tissue, social processes have accelerated and it is now up to WHW to take the pulse of the city and see what the Biennial, a manifestation of international importance, can mean for the city's artists, cultural scene and, finally, its inhabitants. Can the relationship be strengthened by posing these three questions: What, How & for Whom?

Ivana IVKOVIC, July 2008