The Showroom
Event

WHW: Really Useful Knowledge?

Tuesday 14 June 2016
7–9pm
Free, no booking required

Chto_delat

Internationally renowned curatorial collective What, How and for Whom/WHW will give a lecture on how the dynamics of usefulness and uselessness of art has been played out in a number of their recent exhibitions and artistic projects. Through a number of examples that share continuous interest in using the infrastructures of art while developing counter-publics, following topics will be addressed: how institutional infrastructure, both as a material and spatial network and as a symbolic institution of art, can be repurposed to become an ally for various legally and structurally challenging art practices? What are the ways in which those efforts can be related to wider social struggles? What can be a new role of cultural practices in the enclosures imposed by austerity measures, marketization and the recent far-right resurgence?

What, How & for Whom/WHW was formed in 1999 and is based in Zagreb and Berlin. Its members are Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. WHW organises a range of production, exhibition and publishing projects and directs Gallery Nova in Zagreb.

Since its first exhibition titled What, How & for Whom, on the occasion of 152nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, that took place in Zagreb in 2000, WHW curated numerous international projects, among which are Collective Creativity at Kunsthalle Fridericianum in 2005, 11th Istanbul Biennial What Keeps Mankind Alive?, Istanbul, 2009 and One Needs to Live Self-Confidently...Watching, Croatian pavilion at 54th Venice Biennial, 2011. Recent projects by WHW include the festival Meeting Points 7 that took place in Zagreb, Antwerp, Cairo, Hong-Kong, Beirut, Vienna and Moscow under title Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks in 2013 and 2014, exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2014, and David Maljković, Retrospective by appointment, Gallery Nova and various locations