12th cei venice forum for contemporary art curators: abstracts of presentations
Criteria of Memoria. Navigating Memory and Preservation in Contemporary Art.
12th CEI Venice Forum for Contemporary Art Curators. Continental Breakfast 2026.
Venice, Academy of Fine Arts,Academy Auditorium,Fondamenta Zattere Allo Spirito Santo 423,
Friday, 8 May 2026 [2:00– 6:00 pm]
Abstracts of presentations (in order of schedule)
2:15
Adrianna Wiktoria Kowalik
Secondary Archive. Women Artists Rewriting History.
– The presentation introduces Secondary Archive, a platform dedicated to women artists from Central and Eastern Europe developed by the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation. Built from artists’ own voices and experiences, the archive becomes a living space where women artists share perspectives from the region and actively rewrite art history from beyond the dominant Western narratives.
2:35
Lilijana Stepančič
Women’s Memories at the Contemporary Art Festival City of Women in Ljubljana.
– Is contemporary art created by women primarily soaked with recollection? What kind of memories are these? Why are so many of them?
2:55
Nataša Bodrožić
Modernism of the Marginal Seas: (Re)Thinking Monuments of Fragile Materiality.
– The presentation will run through a decade of my experience as a curator as an activist for the modernist heritage of the mid-20th century on the Eastern Adriatic coast, a publisher and producer of contemporary artworks. I will use the framework of my recent project Modernism of the Marginal Seas and intertwine it with the concept (Dis) Trust the Storyteller that I have been developing for six years with a number of collaborators (materialized in two exhibitions and a book) to arrive to an (In)Tangible Monument to Women’s Labour which I am trying to (un)build with contemporary artists and the community of women in a small Dalmatian town.
3:15
Dejvi Dauti
Curating with Care II: Dealing with the Past in Curatorial Practice.
– The lecture presents Curating with Care II: Dealing with the Past, an educational program initiated by Tirana Art Lab (September–December 2025). The program examines the relationship between curatorial practice and sites of memory and tension, focusing on how the past can be reinterpreted through approaches grounded in care, attentiveness, and critical reflection. The second edition, and the final exhibition Embodied Memory, developed at Villa 31 – Art Explora, emphasizes how curatorial methods can engage with contested histories, opening space for alternative readings of collective memory. In this context, the artworks reflecting on the architecture and collective imagery evoked by the former dictator’s Villa are explored as active carriers of historical and symbolic narratives, enabling new interpretations of memory and its persistence across time and space.
4:00
Dessislava Dimova
“What to cook when mom’s not home?”: The Federation of Minor Practices and the Question of Now.
– Following the 2024 Bulgarian participation, The Neighbours, which focused on the erasure and reconstruction of traumatic histories, the 2026 project, The Federation of Minor Practices, offers yet another perspective on the same fundamental question: our responsibility to the present.
Conceived as the “headquarters for a fictional research laboratory”, the project gathers signals from the present as if they were already a “near past.” It proposes a proactive strategy: saving fragments of the now to form the history of our future. In an era of increasingly digitized and disembodied archives, what material traces do we choose to preserve?
The metaphor of cooking, here as an act of taking responsibility for oneself, is also a metaphor of transmission of embodied knowledge. Drawing on the “carrier bag” theory of history, the project suggests that what we carry through times of uncertainty is what keeps us connected and nourished — not only in the present but in our continuity with the past.
4:20
Konstantin Akinsha
Memory and Oblivion. Art in the Time of War.
– Here we are: The Russian war against Ukraine has revealed a troubling truth: that memory and oblivion alike can become instruments of danger — for culture at large, and for art most intimately. We live amid the slow collapse of late twentieth-century regimes of remembrance, once anchored in acts such as the memorialization of the Holocaust. In their place, a more volatile landscape emerges.
Today, we are encircled by political actors who mine trauma and historical memory, reshaping them into pliable mythologies, bending the past to serve the urgencies of power. At the same time, oblivion is no longer absence but strategy — a deliberate erasure, a curated silence, a means of rewriting what was into what must appear to have been. In such a moment, the past itself becomes “plastic”: stretched, recast, and refashioned to prefigure the future. What, then, is the role of the artist in the face of this mutable past? How does one bear witness when memory is weaponized and forgetting is enforced?
4:40
Darko Šimičić
Archive as Paranoia View Art: the Case of Tomislav Gotovac.
– Croatian filmmaker and visual artist Tomislav Gotovac (1937-2010) announced his decade-long project Paranoia View Art in 1986. The project included exhibitions, actions, performances, and a film that centers on the artist as a narrator of world history, on a dark past and an even darker future. The material used to build the project is his personal archive, which was transformed into a total work of art, into the Museum of the Revolution of the People of Tomislav Gotovac.
5:00
Iara Boubnova
How do We Remember?
– As early as the 1960s, Hannah Arendt warned that the past, without critical dialogue with the present, could prove to be a problematic resource for building the future. And now, political scientists Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo note that recently “in the current geopolitical reality, visions of the future have been replaced by analogies from the past. Thinking through historical analogies has become the preferred way of dealing with the anxieties of the present.”
While the political present canonizes the past in a spiral, leaving the future somehow beyond view, artistic memory resists official narratives and creates individual relationships with time and history.
5:20
Irfan Hošić
Cracks, Fractures, and the Archive as Refuge?
– A presentation of the KRAK Center archives, which include an extensive and diverse collection of video, radio, PDF, and other productions. Over the past 5–6 years of KRAK’s activity, the archive has developed into a layered and content-rich treasury — documenting the center’s work, collaborations, media projects, interviews, lectures, and experimental forms, and preserving artifacts that testify to the process of creation and the contexts in which the works were created. The archive serves as a source for research, education, and public presentation.
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[update: 20 April, 2026]