The speakers
Abdullah Alkafri is an award-winning playwright and theatre director. He has worked with arts organisations such as LIFT (UK), the Royal Court Theatre (UK), IEVP (Norway) and Lark (USA). He also works as a trainer, strategic planner, fundraiser and designer for arts intervention initiatives, including with Culture Resource (Al Mawred Al Thaqafy) and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen and elsewhere. He is a member of selection committees for the Arab Council for Social Sciences, and a regular contributor to the Sundance Institute's MENA Theater Lab and the board of the 7th World Summit on Art and Culture.
In 2014, Abdullah Alkafri (as a founding member of Ettijahat - Independent Culture) was elected to succeed Ms Rana Yazji as the NGO's director. The organisation is committed to supporting Syrian artists and cultural practitioners in the Arab region and Europe. The organisation offers training opportunities to artists, cultural practitioners and academics, as well as financial and legal support. Alkafri also teaches theatre at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut, where he is currently a PhD candidate.
Alexandra Tryanova is an independent curator based in Antwerp. Born in Odesa, she works with themes such as recreation, Eastern European conceptual art, gender and institutional critique. In the context of the 5th Biennial of Contemporary Art in Odessa (2017), she founded a non-production residency "Kunsthalle Lustdorf", which continues her work as an independent artistic and curatorial association for open practices and technologies in a suburb of Odessa. Between 2018 and 2019 she worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Odessa, where she curated a list of exhibitions including (un)named by Nikita Kadan and In memoriam exhibition by Stas Volyazlovsky. As a junior curator of the PinchukArtCentre, Alexandra co-curated the exhibition Ain't nobody's business (2019) and curated the exhibition of the 20 artists shortlisted for the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2020). In 2021 she continued her studies in Belgium with the Curator course at KASK (Ghent) and is now working with Jester (Genk) as part of the Conflict Zones series.
Dušica Dražić is an artist, curator and creative producer. She explores spaces of irregularity that carry a strong political meaning. Dušica analyses their transformation and reconsiders them on the level of cultural continuity. The history of the place and opposing interpretations of the past are always at the forefront of her practice. Often, the complexity of the subject brings about a combination of scientific and artistic approaches, which promote transdisciplinary and collaborative work. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has been a resident at Q21-Museums Quartier (Vienna), Iaspis (Stockholm), ISCP (NYC), KulturKontakt (Vienna), TimeLab (Ghent) and Tobačna 001 (Ljubljana). Dražić has initiated and curated collaborative projects and exhibitions. In 2018, together with Wim Janssen, she co-founded OUT OF SIGHT, a contemporary art venue in Antwerp dedicated to audiovisual, experimental and time-based practices. OUT OF SIGHT exposes the value within what we often consider different, marginal or even undesirable. It is a space where the poetic and the political coexist.
Since 2020, Dražić has worked as a creative producer and artistic collaborator at wpZimmer, an international workspace for the arts, with a focus on performance and hybrid artistic practices.
Ann Vandermeulen is the artistic coordinator of Globe Aroma. Globe Aroma is an artistic work and meeting place that offers space, time and a network to artists, co-creators and art lovers with a newcomer background. The place supports people who, due to their precarious citizenship status, often experience specific challenges in accessing the arts sector and developing artistic practices. Globe Aroma therefore builds, in alliance with the Flemish, Brussels and international cultural, educational and migration sectors, a mental and infrastructural in-between space in which a community can create, discover and share art with a broad public.
Milica Ilic (moderator) is a cultural worker specialised in transnational cooperation, especially within the contemporary performing arts. At Onda, the French agency for the distribution of performing arts, she coordinates RESHAPE, an experimental research and development project that aims to rethink the organisational models of the arts sector in Europe and the Southern Mediterranean.
Previously, she was International Advisor at Onda, Communication and Administration Manager at IETM (International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts) and Project Manager at the University of Arts in Belgrade. As a freelance consultant, she works on various international cultural cooperation, training, research and evaluation projects.
