This summer, Kuma International expands beyond the classroom with a three-day public programme exploring artistic responses and curatorial practices in relation to war, displacement, and memory through perspectives emerging from Ukraine and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The programme takes place on 8, 9, and 10 July at Manifesto Gallery in Sarajevo. All events begin at 5:00 pm and are free and open to the public.
Hosted by Manifesto Gallery in Sarajevo, the programme opens with Unboxing, a conversation and participatory session by Ukrainian cultural worker and curator Alona Karavai. The event invites audiences to collectively unpack a box of artworks, explore radically different perspectives on the war in Ukraine, and take part in curating an exhibition together.
The second day features a guided tour of the exhibition, followed by a conversation between curators Alona Karavai, Adna Muslija and Claudia Zini, responding to war, displacement, memory, and lived experience in Ukraine and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The programme concludes with a listening session led by Claudia Zini and Velibor Božović, developed in collaboration with Radio Elsewheres. Drawing on the Radio Elsewheres archive, the session invites audiences to engage with sound, testimony, field recordings, and collective reflection, exploring how listening can shape our understanding of memory, displacement, and conflict.
How many paradoxes can fit into one historical moment? If empathy can be imagined as a carcass, how many contradictions can it hold?
Unboxing is a conversation and a participatory exhibition where viewers unpack artworks together, discussing art, life, and radically different experiences of war (using the case of Russia’s war against Ukraine, but not only). Emigration, military service, interrupted contacts, re-evaluated ideologies, attempts to continue in conditions of an ever-narrowing corridor, death, life, and death again — it’s not us to tell you that, you know it all.
We invite you to unpack a box with nine artworks, which cultural worker and curator Alona Karavai will bring to Sarajevo from Ukraine. Together, we’ll take out the works, discuss them, and create an exhibition situation out of it—a short exhibition, because experiences are fluid, solidarity is situational, and the “boxes” of each and every one of us are contextual.
We’ll unbox works by EtchingRoom1, Sofia Holubeva, Nikolay Karabinovych, Anna Potiomkina, Ksenia Pohrebennyk, Valentyna Prytula, Situational Flowerbeds, Olesia Saiienko, Ruslan Tremba, and Leo Trotsenko.
White gloves will be provided.
Everyone is welcome. Participation is free and no registration is required, though we’d be happy to hear from you if you plan to join us.
The programme is realized with the support of Asortymentna Kimnata and Socially Engaged Arts.
Alona Karavai (b. 1982) is a Ukrainian cultural worker, curator, and essayist. She co-founded project space Asortymentna kimnata, of residency house Khata-Maysternya and publishing project ilostmylibrary. After fleeing Donetsk in 2014 when her workplace, Izolyatsia, was seized and turned into an illegal prison, she focused on arts and community work. Since 2022, she has managed urgent art evacuations of non-musefied art archives, residencies for displaced and combat-affected artists, and educational laboratories like School of contemporary art fra fra fra. Fellow of the first cohort of the Socially Engaged Arts program, European cultural KAIROS Prize laureate in 2023. She is based in Kyiv, exploring themes of peripheries, absence, as well as vitality and death. Lately she concentrated her work on facilitating Death Cafés and piloting arts and community formats about mortality as a way to enrich how we live.
