About Wienwoche

WIENWOCHE is a Viennese festival that experiments with merging creative practices and activism in different scales and formats and from different sides of art and social movements. Since its beginning in 2012, WIENWOCHE has taken place in September every year. WIENWOCHE sees cultural work as engagement in social, political and cultural debates, with the aim of advancing them and making them visible. WIENWOCHE intends to push the boundaries of cultural and artistic practices and make them accessible for all social groups living in Vienna. WIENWOCHE is carried out by the independent “Verein zur Förderung der Stadtbenutzung” (“The Association for the Promotion of City Use”). 

Team

Nataša Mackuljak

Executive Director

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).

Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur

Artistic Director

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.

Jelena Micić

Artistic Director

Jelena Micić (*1986 Knjaževac, Serbia) is an artist and curator. Jelena graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna where they also worked as a study assistant at the Painting and Exhibition Management Department. During their studies, Jelena was involved in the Student Union at the Office for Social Policy and the Office for Economic Affairs. Jelena obtained a master's degree in Philosophy and a diploma degree in Philology at the University of Belgrade. In 2019 they managed 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 the kültür gemma! Fellowship (2018) in IG Bildende Kunst, Jelena was working on the PAY THE ARTIST NOW! campaign. Jelena is interested in socio-political aspects of color (systems), and economic conditions of labor and material. Jelena represents WIENWOCHE in the board of D-Arts Office for Diversity.

Verein zur Förderung der Stadtbenutzung

The Verein zur Förderung der Stadtbenutzung was founded in 2011 to support the new cultural project WIENWOCHE. The development and promotion of socio-political and cultural spaces for artistic, socio-cultural and civil society actors - also in the sense of reclaiming urban public space - is at the heart of its activities.