On Friday, May 9th from 10 am to 2 pm, the MSU Školica hall will host a panel discussion titled The Arts of Resistance, organized as part of the project of the same name and the exhibition presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb from May 8 to June 21, 2025. The project The Arts of Resistance (TAoR) or in Croatian, The Arts of Resistance, initiated by Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond from the HASENHERZ art organization, aims to uncover the connections between historical, cultural, social, political and physical resistance against fascism through a co-creative approach. This approach includes historical research, art workshops and discussions with experts, and an international youth exchange at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, art in public space presented in collaboration with schools and the Braunschweig University of the Arts under the leadership of prof. Martin Krenn, and a publication.
Based on Umberto Eco’s text We Are European (2019), the project examines Europe as an experiment in peace, European identity and resistance to fascism in the past and present. At the intersection of international youth work, contemporary art research and political education, TAoR aims to question artworks and cultural products based on local examples as possible ways of resistance. In order to build a pan-European understanding of fascism and artistically based ways of resisting it, and with the support of internationally renowned artists, young people researched and co-created artworks as expressions of resistance to fascism. At the core of the project is the critical questioning of historical works and the comparison of their contexts, meanings and effects on the present.
10.00 Welcome speech by Vesna Meštrić, Director of MSU
10.05 Ana Škegro: Presentation of the Art of Resistance project
10.20 Presentation of works created in the co-creative process of the Art of Resistance project
11.00 Josip Jagić: Cartography of Resistance
11.15 Sanja Horvatinčić: Footprints of resistance: Material culture of the People’s Liberation Struggle
11.30 Coffee Break
12.00 Vana Gović, Damir Gamulin Gamba and Antun Sevšek: Memorial Center "Lipa Remembers"
12.30 Nika Petković: Slana - Radical Landscape
12.45 Closing Discussion
13.00 Visit to the Art of Resistance exhibition
The programme will be held in English.
BIOGRAPHIES
Damir Gamulin (Zagreb, 1974) is a Zagreb-based designer and researcher who focuses on the interrelations of technology, disciplines, and scales, spanning graphic, editorial, spatial, and interactive design. His projects characteristically involve integrated methods of content development, editing, and interpretation, expanding design practice into new contexts. Gamulin has participated in the Triennale di Milano (2022) and the Taipei Biennial (2020), and served as art director of the Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2006), among numerous regional exhibitions. He is the co-founder of OO (object order), a design and research practice, and has been recognized with multiple awards for cross-disciplinary work that integrates curatorial strategies and design across diverse media.
Vana Gović Marković graduated in Art History and Ethnology in 2006 from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. She is a museum advisor at the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral in Rijeka, where she works as the head of the Memorial Center "Lipa Remembers". In her work, she deals with difficult heritage topics, connecting the culture of memory with contemporary art and participatory practices. From 2018 to 2021, she led the EU project Museum of the Future, within which, for the first time in Croatia, participatory museum management was successfully implemented. She is the author of a number of exhibitions, publications and professional articles.
Sanja Horvatinčić is a Research Associate at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb. Her research focuses on the production of monuments and remembrance culture in socialist Yugoslavia, as well as on heritage and memory politics in the post-socialist context. She has participated in research projects dealing with the history of Yugoslav cultural politics and the Non-Aligned movemement, critical memory and heritage studies, and digital art history. Since 2019, she has led the interdisciplinary heritage project Heritage from Below | Drežnica: Memories and Traces 1941–1945. She is currently running the project Digital Network, Spatial and (Con)textual Analysis of Artistic Phenomena and Heritage of the 20th Century. She authored numerous academic publications.
Josip Jagić (Zagreb, 1987) graduated from the Dr. Ivan Kranjčev High School in Đurđevac, and graduated in modern and contemporary history from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb in 2015. He has been researching the structures of partisan resistance in Yugoslavia during World War II, publishing articles and publications on the topic. Since 2019, he has been working at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe as a project manager and political analyst.
Nika Petković (Rijeka, 1992) completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in filmology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Bologna, Italy, and has been a doctoral student in literature, culture, performing arts and film at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb since 2023. From 2015 to 2018, she collaborated with the Bologna Cinematheque, the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival of classical and restored films, and the Home Movies archive of amateur and experimental films, as a researcher of archival materials on various film projects. Since 2021, she has also collaborated with the ZagrebDox documentary film festival as a film selector and host of discussions with authors, and since 2024, she has been employed by the 25 FPS audiovisual research association, as the association's coordinator and film program selector. For the past six years, she has been writing film reviews for the filmological magazine Croatian Film Yearbook, the Kulturpunkt portal, and Vizkultura. In addition to film art, her area of interest is particularly focused on photography. She has exhibited in several group and solo exhibitions (Persona, 2019; Slana - Radical Landscape, 2021; Tok, 2023).
Antun Sevšek is an architect, researcher, and activist focused on developing urban planning strategies and exploring their disruptions in relation to the social and material realities of the city. He has been a long-time member of Platforma 9.81, a non-governmental organization dedicated to research, education, and activism in the fields of architecture and urbanism. Since 2014, he has been active in the associations Pravo na grad (Right to the City) and Operacija grad (Operation City), where he monitors and analyzes spatial planning documents, urban governance policies, and works on the development of innovative institutional models. He collaborates continuously with Damir Gamulin on research and design across various media and project types, with a particular focus on public and cultural spaces—primarily on signage systems, product design, exhibition installations, and architecture. This collaboration has been recognized with several awards: the Neven Šegvić Award in 2015 for the book and exhibition Spaces of Co-Participation, the Grand Prize of the 52nd Zagreb Salon in 2016 for the Lipa Remembers Memorial Collection project, the Interior Design Award at the 22nd Architecture Salon in Novi Sad, and the Bernardo Bernardi Award in 2020 for the exhibition design of If I Forget You… – The Holocaust in Croatia 1941–1945 / Final Destination Auschwitz.
