16 Jun 2020

Autostrada Biennale announces co-curators for its third edition

Prizren, 15 June 2020– International Contemporary Art Biennale 'Autostrada Biennale' with great pleasure announces Övül Ö. Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza from Berlin as co-curators for its third edition which will be held from July to September 2021 in Kosovo.

AUTOSTRADA BIENNALE will take place in Summer of 2021 and will not be postponed. It will rather directly take into account how much the pandemic made us think about our cities, our expanded localities, what we can go back to, what we can leave behind, and how necessary art is in times of uncertainty. We are pleased and proud to announce that Övül Ö. Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza will take us upon that journey as co-curators of the next edition of our Biennale.

AUTOSTRADA BIENNALE started from its own locality in Prizren, Kosovo in 2014 (first edition 2017) built on a feeling of lacking, the need for more cultural exchange in the region, and an opening up to the world. It established itself as a connecting point, and a route on the map of the West Balkans. The pandemic demanded us to rethink the Biennale model, and for this we cannot be more enthusiastic to partner with two interdependent curators who will further work with our legacy: very local and yet very connected.

'Autostrada Biennale, the young grassroots organisation established by two artists and a pedagogue in their hometown Prizren, takes us on an extraordinary trip' write Övül Ö. Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza. 'Today is the time to imagine another kind of day after: how to make art bridge one another beyond the screens and white cubes out in the public; how to keep curious; how to joy and how to relate; how to be intimate with art and artists; how to exercise translocal; how to embrace the anxiety of unforeseeable future and dream beyond it. We travel with Autostrada Biennale on a road towards the complex webs of interdependency with one another and other lives we share the planet with. Autostrada Biennale will respond to the circumstances and the political landscape, send smoke signals between here and there, produce collective fun through non-asymmetrical learning and doing. We are more than thrilled to take up this journey, starting in Prizren, one of the most multiethnic and multicultural cities of Europe.'

Övül Ö. Durmusoglu is an interdependent curator, writer and program co-leader in the Graduate School in UdK in Berlin and a visiting professor at HFBK in Braunschweig. She acts between exhibition making and public programming, singular languages and collective energies, worldly immersions and political cosmologies. Övül was a curator at Steirischer Herbst; co-curated different sections of 10th, 13th and 14th Istanbul Biennials; and organised Public Programs for dOCUMENTA (13). Originally from Ankara, she lives in Berlin.

Joanna Warsza is a Program Director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts in Stockholm, and an interdependent curator and editor interested in how art functions politically and socially outside the white cubes. She was the Artistic Director of Public Art Munich 2018, curator of the Georgian Pavilion at the 55thVenice Biennale and associate curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale and edited several books. Originally from Warsaw, she lives in Berlin.

In April 2020 Övül and Joanna initiated the exhibition 'Die Balkone: Life, Art, Pandemic and Proximity' in windows and balconies of Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district where they both live.

Autostrada Biennale will be presented in both analog and digital form in summer of 2021.

Autostrada Biennale
Media Team