Interview

Andrej Bereta (1970, Doboj) is a curator, art historian and cultural entrepreneur.

He is the Co-founder of ARTIKAL, Belgrade, since 2008. Since 2011 he is investing his strengths on the Project About and around curating/Kustosiranje (co-author with Srdjan Tunic), an educative and research curatorial project, based on the idea of lifelong learning, designed for professionals and students from the fields of arts and culture and open for general public. The mission of the project includes: developing toolbox and required skills, working on curatorial practices and on the technologies of preparation and realisation of independent exhibition project, education and supporting proactive attitude of young and future art curators, team work, developing entrepreneurship in the field of culture, spreading share culture.
Developed as a public program, it is strongly oriented on regional cooperation. This is an academic course for master studies at University of Belgrade in partnership with University of Vilnius and in cooperation with European Universities.

Since 2014 he is curator of Arts Kozara: international AiR, Art Laboratory in nature on mountain Kozara (BiH). In 2013
he was the director (with Srdjan Tunic) of Mikser Festival 2013 for Visual arts. In 2008 he co-created the Project ARTUR- Cultural tour for disabled persons. Andrej is co-creator and participant of Creative Mentorship. Finally, he is a lecturer on Visual Arts at Independent University of Banjaluka (BiH).

Mia Kang writes poems and other perversions. She is the author of City Poems (2020), a poetry pamphlet from ignitionpress. Mia was named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest by Mónica de la Torre, and her writing has appeared in journals including POETRY, Washington Square Review, Narrative Magazine, and PEN America. She is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, runner-up for the 2019 and 2017 Discovery Poetry Contests, and finalist for the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Mia is also a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, where her research focuses on the contested rise of U.S. multiculturalism and its failures. Recent publications include contributions to The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop (Skira, 2019), Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale University Press, 2020), Published by Lugemik: Printed Matter from 2010-2019 (Lugemik, 2019), and Plot magazine. Formerly a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she teaches as a lecturer at Yale College and Hunter College, CUNY, her alma mater.

Canadian artist Alana Bartol comes from a long line of water witches. Her site-responsive artworks explore divination as a way of understanding across places, species, and bodies. Through collaborative and individual works, she creates relationships between the personal sphere and the landscape, particular to this time of ecological crisis.

A multidisciplinary artist with a B.F.A. from the University of Windsor (Canada) and an M.F.A. from Wayne State University (USA), she has been a visitor to Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Alberta in Treaty 7 Territory for five years. In 2019, she was longlisted for Canada’s Sobey Art Award representing the Prairies and North. Bartol’s work has been presented in festivals and galleries nationally and internationally including Esker Foundation Project Space, PlugIn ICA, Latitude 53, Walter Phillips Gallery, Berlin Feminist Film Festival, Hong Kong Arthouse Film Festival, Brussels Independent Film Festival, Istanbul Experimental Film Festival, and Media City International Film and Video Festival, amongst others. Bartol currently teaches at Alberta University of the Arts.

For more research on this work visit Orphan Well Adoption Agency. Follow her residency with University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. Her upcoming 2-person exhibition at Viviane Art Gallery with Sandra Meigs in July-August 2020.

Leah Patgorski is a Pittsburgh-based artist who was born in Virginia Beach, VA. She earned a degree in Architecture at the University of Virginia followed by an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing on a background in architecture and landscape architecture, she develops contextual textile installations for interiors as well as smaller sculptural works. Her work advocates for a connection to other humans and to history that natural fibers and colors can provide. She is particularly interested in plant-derived hues, seeking the resonance of subtle color variations within explorations of abstract form. She views the handmade and the hand-dyed as antidotes to the homogenization of architecture and of culture, which in her opinion is an unsavory trend.

Leah is also part of a collective with two other women who work together on the Other Border Wall Project, an ongoing creative resistance against harmful border practices. Their work has been supported by grants from Opportunity Fund and The Pittsburgh Foundation, and their work has been exhibited at Flatland Gallery in Houston, TX.

She has collaborated on projects with other artists including Michelle Litvin and Wafaa Bilal, and with design firms including Formwork and Studio Lithe. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with venues including the Strohl Arts Center in Chautauqua, NY; ADDS DONNA in Chicago, IL; SWDZ in Vienna, Austria; the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA, and Assemble in Pittsburgh, PA.

The book mentioned in the interview is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.