Easttopics

Artist: Katarzyna Wyszkowska
Title: Perfect World
Curator: Piotr Sikora
Venue: Pragovka Gallery
Photos: Marcel Rozhoň, Szymon Sokołowski

We invite you to a space where Katarzyna Wyszkowska has created an installation reminiscent of a dollhouse—a place where we can play pretend to be masters of our own destinies and try our hand at constructing new worlds, orders, and rules.

Artists: Stella Koleszár and Eszter Metzing
Title: I SURFACED FROM A DEEP, SWAMPY SLEEP
Curator: Júlia Salamon
Venue: Vajda Lajos Studio, Szentendre
Photos: Balázs Deim
Sound installation: Rozi Mákó

In their exhibition at the basement gallery of the Vajda Lajos Studio in Szentendre (Hungary), lutum (Stella Koleszár and Eszter Metzing) continue their ongoing artistic research into early childhood socialization, school as a secondary social environment, exclusionary and abusive dynamics within children’s communities, and the ways experiences of isolation, violence, and shame can persist into adulthood. These themes unfold throughout the installation in a subtle, metaphorical, and poetic manner.
The exhibition title is borrowed from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963). Another key point of reference is the dual ecology of the floodplain: the layered processes of decay and decomposition unfolding beneath the surface, and the emergence of new forms above the waterline. Within lutum’s installations, soft and rigid, ephemeral and static material qualities – adobe, sand, glass, textile, and paper – are placed into dialogue with one another.

Lungs expanding again after a state of oxygen deprivation.

Repair as Method: Notes from the UnSchool of Curating
Jelena Sofronijevic reflects on their experience of the framework of the eight UnSchool of Curating, held in Timișoara and Cluj, Romania, between 19 – 26 June, 2026, led by Antonia Alampi (Spore Initiative) and organised by Art Encounters Foundation and Cluj Cultural Center.

Artist: Mia Akrap
Title: Stronger Than Boe
Venue: Trotoar Gallery, Zagreb
Curator: Gabriella Rebello Kolandra
Photos: Damir Žižić

Mia Akrap (Požega, 1995) draws on her own life as her primary material. The works presented here are new, produced for her first solo show at Trotoar Gallery, and engage with questions of relationality, trauma, and autobiography. Although the exhibition does not include paintings, the artist’s primary medium, it nevertheless reflects a sustained commitment to it. Akrap’s confessional approach translates her inner emotional and psychological landscape – memories, affects, and personal experiences – into a body of work that is at once intimate and resonant beyond the individual. The exhibition firmly situates her practice within a broader feminist discourse.

Hurray✨
Moldova joining us as a new partner country

This interview took place within the framework of the Unschool of Curating, held in Timișoara and Cluj, Romania, between 19 – 26 June, 2026, organized by Art Encounters Foundation and Cluj Cultural Center. This program, now in its 8th edition, is developed collaboratively by the two organizations to strengthen curatorial networks in Romania and internationally. The Unschool of Curating focuses on informal methodologies, alternative pedagogies, and practice-led curatorial discourse. Antonia Alampi was invited this year to conduct this school in the spirit of her inspiring work as a curator, cultural organizer, and Director of Spore Initiative in Berlin.

On Monday, the 7th edition of the East Call Curatorial Residency started. ✨
This intensive 2-week program brings together emerging curators to explore the contemporary art scenes of Hungary and Slovenia within a broader regional context. Through studio visits, workshops, exhibitions, and conversations with leading art professionals in Budapest and Ljubljana, participants will dive into curatorial practices, institutional frameworks, and the evolving role of curators today.
Stay tuned as we follow this year’s residents on their journey 👀

At the 61st Venice Biennale, the Polish Pavilion’s Liquid Tongues explores alternative forms of communication, collective listening, and coexistence across human and more-than-human worlds. In conversation with curators Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko, we discussed Deaf culture, underwater communication, geopolitical realities, and the political potential of attentiveness itself. Moving between activism and poetic immersion, the pavilion challenges dominant linguistic and social hierarchies while imagining new forms of community in a world marked by crisis, exclusion, and fragmentation.

Adelina Luft sees the first-ever Moldova Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale not simply as a national debut, but as a political and emotional act of resistance. In conversation with us, the curator reflects on Pavel Brăila’s On the Thousand and Second Night—an installation staged inside Venice’s Santa Veneranda chapel that confronts war, territorial violence, and the collapse of collective imagination through carpets, drone propellers, and sound. Luft speaks about the limits of the “Eastern European” label, the uneven visibility of artists outside Western institutional networks, and why Moldova’s presence at the Biennale matters in the current geopolitical climate. Rather than offering a direct political illustration, the pavilion proposes what she calls “an invitation to rewrite the narrative of the future”—a fragile but urgent space where unease and hope coexist.