Public lecture by Jelena Vesić
03.09.2026 | 20:00
Europe House Struga
free enterance
As part of Curating in Context 5 – Futuring New Worlds, we warmly invite you to join us for a public lecture by Jelena Vesić.
Hybrid regimes of the contemporary right — what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism in functional terms and illiberal democracy in ideological terms — do not abolish the public sphere. They exhaust it. What remains is a stretched, saturated field of participation: citizens are present and vocal, yet structurally unable to effect change.
The mass protests that marked Serbia in 2024-2025 briefly reopened another horizon. They produced a surge of sociality – less as a program than as affect: solidarity, care, horizontality, self-organization through student plenums, citizens’ assemblies, occupations and blockades. A different public began to emerge, grounded in shared presence rather than representation.
Yet this insurgent sociality was ultimately folded back into an electoral framework shaped by precarious conditions – corrupt, clientelist, and often coercive state infrastructures spanning media, judiciary, and security apparatuses.
This lecture examines how the public sphere is negotiated under such conditions, and how artistic and civic practices sustain struggles for the right to the city, the village, water, land, and air.
Biography:
Jelena Vesić (PhD) is an independent curator, editor and lecturer, based in Belgrade and working internationally. She engages with publishing, research and exhibition practices that intertwine political theory and contemporary art.
Vesić curated many exhibitions, among them Lecture Performance (MoCA, Belgrade and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2009/10, w. Anja Dorn and Kathrin Jentjens) as well as the collective exhibition project Political Practices of (post-) Yugoslav Art (2009), which critically examined art historical concepts and narratives on Yugoslav art after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Her exhibition In Collectivising (MG, Ljubljana, 2022) deals with the feminist interventions into the art-historical narration on the 20th century avant-garde art collectives.
Vesić is editor of Alt-Truths and Insta-Realities: The Psychopolitics of Contemporary Right, Red Thread #5, 2020 (w. Vladimir Jerić Vlidi), Stagecraft by Vesna Pavlović, Vanderbilt University Press, 2021, Feminist Takes: Early Works by Želimir Žilnik (w. Antonia Majaca and R. O’Reilly), Sternberg Press, 2021 and Yugoslav Art Space (w. Branislav Dimitrijević and Ješa Denegri), JRP Ringer, 2024).
Curating in Context 2026 is organized by Lokomotiva – Centre for New Initiatives in Arts and Culture and Braunschweig University of Art represented by Professor Elena Korowin, PhD.
We extend our gratitude to Europe House Struga for their generous support in providing space for the programme.
The international school Curating in Context 2026 is supported by Democracy in Action project funded by European Union’s HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-02 under grant agreement No. 101178843; the Culture for Development project of the Government of Switzerland and is implemented by Heartefact Fund; Heinrich Böll Foundation; Braunschweig University of Art; zukunft.niedersachsen and the Performance Situation Room / LLB 3 project co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union; The content/opinions can in no way be considered to reflect the views of the donors.