What, How & for Whom / WHW launches its annual open call for the eighth year of the tuition-free transdisciplinary study program WHW Akademija. The program for 2026 continues under the title Remember Freedom. WHW Akademija offers localized knowledge of the region, its artists and histories, as well as its political urgencies.
Thematically and methodologically, the programme, just as in 2025, addresses questions that seem to be in opposition – poetry and borders. Together with the participants, we will investigate the notion of 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. 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. The question of the relationality between concrete borders and the abstract freedom of poetry is one we want to explore together, as antagonism, as counterbalance and as different aspects of the intimate treatment of bodies trying (and failing) to cross.
The programme is open to artists based anywhere while focusing on artistic practices primarily grounded in the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe. The programme 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 which will be announced in April. Curator Sebastian Cichocki serves as a resident professor in 2026. In her hometown of Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the participants will work with artist Selma Selman.
The program will be held both online and through two physical sessions, with one visit to Zagreb and one visit to both Zagreb and Bihać. The latter is realized in collaboration with Center for Contemporary Culture KRAK. Bihać has always been a border city, since Ottoman/Habsburg rivalries, with a heavy history both during the 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 programme we will work with the Kontakt collection, which is our partner.
The program starts in April 2026 and runs through October 2026, launching with online sessions in April, before convening a first in-person gathering in Zagreb in May. The program continues online until the end of October 2026, when the participants will once more reconvene in Zagreb and visit Bihać.
Application deadline: 2.3.2026
Additional information, dates and all practicalities around applying can be found here.
FUNDERS
WHW Akademija is realised in partnership with Kontakt Art Collection and funded by ERSTE Foundation, Foundation for Arts Initiatives, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Ministry of Culture and Media of Republic of Croatia, City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb and Kultura Nova Foundation.
