Centered around WHW Akademija 2025 and its focus on borders and poetry, the exhibition To Move, To Stay, To Return unfolds as a poetic and political contemplation on movement, belonging, and the fragile yet necessary architectures of freedom. Drawing from personal and collective experiences—including the WHW Akademija collective research trip to Bihać in May—the artists explore how border regimes are produced and maintained. Who holds the power to host, and who is condemned to remain a perpetual guest, deprived of the right to move, to stay, or to return? Can artistic and educational platforms become spaces where we create both physical and metaphorical refuges?

Taking these questions as starting points, the exhibition calls for the abolition of borderlands as zones of control and exclusion, reclaiming them instead through collective resistance and tenderness. It proposes that places of refuge can be found in solidarity, in being, thinking, and moving together. Through layered images, it assembles an archive of crossings, where the very notion of a border becomes unstable. Resonating through sessions with guests of WHW Akademija 2025, it becomes a  site of an encounter: not a final destination, but a moment in time and space where we rethink the borders and our relation to them. Oscillating between a suitcase and a pocket exhibition, To Move, To Stay, To Return offers a flexible format that enables bringing things and ideas along and sharing them with others. It invites us to look beyond the immediately visible and to inhabit the in-betweens, where the right to move, stay, and return resonates as both a personal desire and a collective demand.

In its seventh generation, WHW Akademija has evolved as a process of collaborative learning, facilitated by seminars, lectures, and workshops led by Branislav Dimitrijević, Ayesha Hameed, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, KRAK, Dubravka Sekulić, Emina Bužinkić, Bojan Mucko and Marijana Hameršak, and Harsha Walia. The last part of this year’s program in Zagreb includes a seminar with Miloš Trakilović, and a number of site visits in Zagreb. ‍

Special thanks to the GMK Gallery. 

WHW Akademija is realized in partnership with Kontakt Collection /  ERSTE Foundation.

WHW Akademija is supported by:
City Office for Culture and Civil Society
FfAI – Foundation for Arts Initiatives
Kultura Nova Foundation
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
Trust for Mutual Understanding (TMU)‍

Sponsored by: Tikveš Winery