Verein zur Förderung der Stadtbenutzung
The “Verein zur Förderung der Stadtbenutzung” (“The Association for the Promotion of City Use”) was founded in 2011, as the supporting association of the new cultural project, WIENWOCHE. The development and promotion of socio-political and cultural latitude for artistic, socio-cultural and civil society participants – also in the sense of reclaiming urban space - will be the focus of activities.
DIRECTORS AND FESTIVAL (CO)CURATORS
Nataša Mackuljak
Executive Director | natasa.mackuljak@wienwoche.org
Nataša Mackuljak (b. 1977 Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is a performer, multimedia artist, social worker, curator and cultural producer. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, with the thesis On Historical Continuities between Anti-Fascist Women's Action and Feminist Performance Art in the Former Yugoslavia. For three years (2016/17/18) she worked as artistic director and managing director of Wienwoche, the international and transcultural festival for Art and Activism in Vienna. In November 2013, she completed her master's degree at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the class for post-conceptual art practices with the performance „Bodies, Borders, and the Politics of Transition“. Her art projects deal with questions of migration, precarity and gender. She studied sciences and technology of multimedia at the University of Social Sciences in Udine and worked in Italy on media projects as radio and TV editor of weekly programmes on radio and TV Rai 3 (2005–2008). As a war refugee in the 1990s, she became involved in feminist anti-war movements in the former Yugoslavia: since 1994 she has been part of Woman in Black Belgrade; she was the co-founder and deputy leader of the Youth Peace Group Danube, Vukovar, Croatia (1997–2002); and she was an international project coordinator for youth issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina through the programme of the Swedish Embassy in Sarajevo (1999–2002).
Jelena Micić
Artistic Director | jelena.micic@wienwoche.org
Jelena Micić (b. 1986 Knjaževac, Serbia) is an artist and curator. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna where she also worked as a study assistant at the Painting and Exhibition Management Department. During her studies, she was involved in the Student Union at the Office for Social Policy and the Office for Economic Affairs. She obtained a master's degree in Philosophy and a diploma degree in Philology at the University of Belgrade. In 2019 she was managing the open working group I KNOW I CARE, as part of the WIENWOCHE Festival. Awarded the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award (2021), and Ö1 Talentestipendium Bildende Kunst (2018). As part of her kültür gemma! Fellowship (2018) in IG Bildende Kunst, she was working on the PAY THE ARTIST NOW! campaign. She is interested in socio-political aspects of color (systems), and economic conditions of labor and material. Founder of the informal group UMETNIK*.
Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur
Co-Curator | araba.evelyn.johnston-arthur@univie.ac.at
Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur was an activist and cofounder of Pamoja, the Movement of the Young African Diaspora in Austria and the Researchgroup of Black Austrian History. Her transdisciplinary work and interventions as a community organizer, researcher, artistic-cultural worker, employee representative (Betriebsrat), curator, public speaker, and educator have been crucially nourished by her (un)learning journeys in Austria, Ghana, the UK and the US and by the art of collective processes of creation. Araba studied Black Politics, International Relations and African Diasporan History and, among other courses, taught the “Art of Creating Resistance in the African Diaspora in Germany, Austria, Switzerland” and at the historically Black Howard University in Washington DC. She is a recovering storyteller growing into becoming a junior-junior-elder in decolonial-untraining engaged in creating sustainable architectures of memory that are ways to bring and keep unrecognized knowledge into collective liberating knowing. Araba is currently part of the directors collective of MUSMIG (Museum der Migration), struggling for self-determined historicization of migration in Austria while questioning the foundational violence of museums in Europe and teaching at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Denise Palmieri
Co-Curator | denise.palmieri@wienwoche.org
Denise Palmieri (b. 1986 São Paulo, Brazil) is a performance artist, curator based in Vienna. Master’s degree in visual arts and performing arts by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. As a performance artist, she mixes experience and consciousness unfolding ritualistic and political aspects of the body and the voice questioning binary, normative knowledge production. She has performed on stages at TQW, Brut, Tanzhaus Zürich, and many others. Since 2020 Palmieri is the co-president of the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ) working mainly as curator and managing the association by creating a sense of artistic community among affiliated artists. She has curated in 2022 together with Marissa Lôbo the festival “Vivências–Between Care & Artistic Practices,” a project of kültür gemma!. The festival approaches the topic of politics of care and hospitality from interdisciplinary perspectives. She has ministered lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Gender Studies) and the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Gender Affairs).
Team
FORMER DIRECTORS AND FESTIVAL (CO)CURATORS
