Big Ideas in Art and Culture: What, How & for Whom / WHW

What, How & for Whom/WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb and Berlin. Its members are curators Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. WHW organizes a range of production, exhibitions 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, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2005; 11th Istanbul Biennial What Keeps Mankind Alive?, Istanbul, 2009; 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, Madrid, 2014, So You Want To See, e-flux gallery, New York, 2015, Again and Again, David Maljković’s retrospective, (co-curated with Bojana Piškur), Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, 2016; My Sweet Little Lamb, (everything we see can also be otherwise), (co-curated with Kathrin Rhomberg), various locations in Zagreb, 2016/2017; Everything we see could also be otherwise (My sweet little lamb), (co-curated with Kathrin Rhomberg and Emily Pethick) The Showroom, London, 2017. 

Lecture: “My Sweet Little Lamb, (everything we see can also be otherwise)”

What, How & for Whom/WHW will present their practice, concerned with the continuous reconfiguration of the relationships of artistic and cultural production with notions of authorship, collecting, and display, as well as with history and politics. WHW's lecture will be focused on their most recent project My Sweet Little Lamb, (everything we see can also be otherwise) which they co-curated in collaboration with Kathrin Rhomberg. Titled after a work by Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović (1947-2016), the project was inspired by his life-long anti-systematic artistic approach that searched for more autonomous ways of artistic production. After six exhibition episodes, taking place from November 2016 to May 2017 in independent art spaces, artists’ studios and private apartments in Zagreb, the project’s epilogue has been recently staged at The Showroom, London. Based on the Kontakt Art Collection from Vienna, which includes seminal works by artists from Central, Eastern and South-East Europe from 1960s to the present, the project juxtaposed the collection’s canonical works with a number of historical and contemporary works in order to address and reframe some of the recurring themes that stem from the collection, such as radical utopianism, the figure of the dissident artist, questions of gendered bodies, political subjectivities and engagement, and the status of public space.