The fourth Art Weekend Belgrade (AWB) will take place from June 6 to June 16, 2024. Organized by Cultural Front and KC Grad, this event aims to support and promote the local creative scene, enabling Serbian artists to connect and collaborate with international artists and curators.
This year’s central exhibition is titled “Questions of Belonging,” inspired by Merle Radtke, the renowned director of Kunsthalle Munster and this year’s guest curator at AWB, reflecting on current issues of belonging in contemporary society. The exhibition will be showcased at four unconventional locations in downtown Belgrade.
In addition to the main exhibition, visitors will be able to participate in an adventurous treasure hunt, discovering “artistic treasures” at various locations throughout the city. The initiator and artistic director of Art Weekend Belgrade, Ljudmila Stratimirović, announced a rich program in cooperation with museums, galleries, and independent cultural centers. You can view the complete program at the following link: AWB Program 2024
AWB 2024 is supported by EUNIC Serbia – National Institutes for Culture of the European Union in Serbia, Goethe-Institut, Embassy of Portugal, Italian Cultural Institute, Embassy of Finland, Hungarikum Center, Czech Centar Belgrade, Austrian Cultural Forum, SBB, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, and Earth PR.
Detailed Information About AWB 2024:
The theme of this year’s main exhibition, “Questions of Belonging,” proposed by guest curator Merle Radtke, director of Kunsthalle Munster, Germany, is particularly relevant today. This time, artists at four central Belgrade locations will contemplate and respond to the question of belonging, which can be posed for various reasons and does not always have an answer. The locations of this year’s main exhibition are atypical, and all except KC Grad’s City Gallery have not been used as venues for artistic installations and interventions before. With the help of an illustrated map, visitors will embark on a specific treasure hunt adventure, discovering “artistic treasures” at this year’s Art Weekend Belgrade locations.
AWB also gathers and maps a large number of participants such as museums, galleries, independent cultural centers, and art spaces, which together contribute to the rich program of the event. Apart from the exhibition prepared by KC Grad, many Belgrade art spaces and galleries will offer their scheduled programs during the event.
The guest curator for AWB 2024 is Merle Radtke, who has been the director of Kunsthalle Munster since 2018, where she creates and executes exhibitions and public programs. She is also responsible for the city’s significant public art collection, which includes works by Claes Oldenburg, Rebecca Horn, Donald Judd, Silke Wagner, and many other notable artists. Before becoming director of Kunsthalle Munster, she worked as a curator for Hamburger Kunsthalle and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, as well as a curator and selector of art films. From 2015 to 2017, she was a research associate in the postgraduate program Aesthetics of the Virtual at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. In 2018, she was a fellow at the Villa Kamogawa Goethe Institute in Japan. She regularly publishes texts on contemporary art and culture.
AWB 2024 will feature over 30 artists at four interesting locations within the exhibition “Questions of Belonging.” The City Gallery of KC Grad, part of the Staklopan factory on Strahinjića Bana Street, the former Peking restaurant on Vuka Karadžića Street, and the underground passage near Albania Palace are the venues where visitors will enjoy the works of contemporary artists from Serbia, Austria, China, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina from June 6 to 16. The AWB program also includes premieres of multimedia performances: on June 6, the GRADsky agen show will gather a large number of performers, models, designers, visual artists, musicians, and dancers at the location of the Spanish House near KC Grad. At the same location, the Beton Kunst collective will perform a poetic choral performance on June 9 as the culmination of a walk through all the spaces of the main AWB exhibition. Sessions of discussions with local and international guest curators, artistic directors, artists, and critics will be held at various locations during the duration of AWB.
