Bauhaus Ecologies: Art, Environment and Critical Thought in Eastern and Southeastern Europe

The question of how to read anew the Bauhaus legacy and modernism through the ecology today is at the center of the program, whereby ecology is understood not only as a relationship to nature and environment, but also as a way of thinking, as a web of relations between materials and ideas, past and present practices, art and everyday life.

Two roundtables will take place through two interconnected thematic units. First is starting from artistic and curatorial practices in which nature is not a mere motif or object of representation, but the space of processes, material relations, and transformations. In dialogue with the exhibitions Ecologies of the Bauhaus – Webs of Continuity and Natura Po/etica, issues related to landscape, materiality, change, and recycling as artistic and curatorial techniques, and also as a way of different understanding the relationships between humans, materials, and the environment will be addressed.

Second thematic unit focuses on museal collections and archives as places for preserving, transmitting, and reactivating knowledge. The museum is viewed as a public space where heritage is interpreted and re-connected with current artistic, social, and institutional issues. A special emphasis will be placed on dynamic research spaces, accessibility, reinterpretation, and institutional responsibility for ecological values.

The program participants: Regina Bittner (Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau), Vera Lauf (Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau), Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu, Maja Vardjan (Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana), Jasmina Fučkan (MSU Zagreb), Silvio Vujičić, Darko Fritz, Ana Škegro (MSU Zagreb), Ivan Skvrce (Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb), and Vesna Meštrić (MSU Zagreb).

The program also includes a presentation of the project Ecologies of Absence, Learning Environment, associated with the Academy of Fine Arts, and guided tours for exhibitions Ecologies of the Bauhaus – Webs of Continuity and Natura Po/etica.

Expert Forum
ART, ENVIRONMENT, AND CRITICAL THOUGHT
20 May 2026
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

10:00–10:10
Welcome remarks:
Vesna Meštrić

10:10–10:30
About the project Bauhaus Ecologies:
Regina Bittner

10:30–11:00 - Keynote Lecture
Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu
Turning to the Land Leviathan: Art in Relation to the Living Territory

11:00–12:30 - Round Table 1 - Artistic Ecologies: Nature, Material, Process and Reuse / Bauhaus Ecologies Today: Ecology and the Reading of Modernism and Its Legacies

This round table brings together curatorial and artistic positions that explore the relationship between artistic practice, nature, materiality, and forms of reuse. Ecology is framed as a conceptual model of interdependence, while recycling is approached as an artistic and curatorial method for reactivating and translating existing materials, forms, and archival sources into new media and contexts.

The discussion draws on perspectives opened by the exhibitions Bauhaus Ecologies – Webs of Continuity and Natura po-etica: on the one hand, the question of how modernist ideas of design, form, and collectivity can be reread through ecological thought today; on the other, how contemporary artistic practices engage landscape, organic processes, vulnerability, and the relationship between human and non-human worlds. In this sense, the round table asks what “ecology” means when reading modernism and its legacies, but also how ecological thinking is articulated through artistic practice in the present.

Moderator:
Vesna Meštrić

Participants:
Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu (independent researcher), Regina Bittner (Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau), Jasmina Fučkan (MSU, Zagreb), Silvio Vujičić (artist), Darko Fritz (artist)

Key topics:
- ecological readings of modernism and its legacies
- art practices - nature as an agent rather than a motif
- recycling as an aesthetic and curatorial strategy
- landscape, process, nature in contemporary art

12:15–13:30 - Lunch break

13:30–14:00 Project Presentation: Ecologies of Absence: Learning Environment
Academy of Fine Arts

14:00–15:30 - Round Table 2: Collections and Archives as Knowledge Infrastructure

This round table considers modernism as an open archive, and the museum as an institution that manages resources and memory. Collections and archival materials are discussed as starting points for research, reinterpretation, and public programmes, as well as a field of responsibility: what is preserved, how it is interpreted, who has access, and under what conditions. In this sense, ecology is understood as a relational model encompassing material flows, social structures, and mental patterns.

The discussion also reflects the perspectives opened by the project Bauhaus Ecologies, especially in relation to the role of museum collections and archives in rereading the legacy of modernism today and in shaping new connections between historical materials, contemporary interpretations, and institutional practice.

Moderator:
Jasmina Fučkan

Participants:
Vera Lauf (Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau), Vesna Meštrić (MSU Zagreb), Maja Vardjan (MAO Ljubljana), Ana Škegro (MSU Zagreb), Ivan Skvrce (ALU Zagreb)

Key topics:
- museum as a public knowledge infrastructure
- recycling as a curatorial methodology of montage and re-linking
- access policies: cataloguing, digitisation, interpretation, mediation
- collection as a site of reinterpretation and institutional memory

16:30–16:40 - Closing remarks

15:30 –16:30 - Guided tour of the exhibitions:
- Bauhaus Ecologies – Webs of Continuity
- Natura po/etica

More about the exhibition The Bauhaus Ecologies:

Bauhaus Ecologies – Webs of Continuity
24. 2. —24. 5. 2026
MSU, Zagreb

Artworks from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art related to the Bauhaus heritage and its reverberations in art practices after the World War II were used as a starting point for the exhibition Bauhaus Ecologies – Webs of Continuity. Works by Otti Berger, Ivana Tomljenović Meller, and the EXAT 51 group, are three standpoints from which the modernism is perceived as a living system, as a web of processes, relationships, and transformations.

In her work, textile designer Otti Berger posed questions about material, structure and tactility; films and photos by Ivana Tomljenović Meller demonstrated how rhythm and repetitions are forming perceptions of time and space, as well as the relationship between natural cycles and the everyday, and members of the EXAT 51 group developed spatial schemes whereby the shaping became method for the spatial organization as a system of relations and ways by which the space is constructed, used and shared.

In this reading of historical artworks, ecology enters as a way of thinking, in terms of "the three ecologies" linked by the French philosopher and psychotherapist Félix Guattari – environmental, social and mental ecology. Hence, modernism is not understood as a closed historical style, but as an open archive of possibilities which can be read critically and reintroduced in the contemporary social and environmental context. In the exhibition, Guattari's threefold perspective finds a parallel to the three levels of linking artworks – material, conceptual and social – by which changes in materials, relationships and meanings are traced over time.

Exhibition is organized in three sections: Material as a Structure, Rhythm of the Picture and Space as a System, whereby each section establishes its own way of reading the continuity by connecting historical footholds with artworks made from the second half of 20th century until today. This relationship is thus shown as aesthetic and ethical procedure by which a material and its traces, ideas and knowledge as well as cultural layers are reinterpreted and exposed to new meanings.

More about exhibition Natura Po-etica:

Natura Po_etica
3. 3. — 24. 5. 2026
MSU, Zagreb

The exhibition Natura Po_etica brings together works inspired by land art and Earthworks, tracing these ideas from the 1960s to the present within a local context.
Recent works by invited artists are presented in dialogue with pieces from the museum’s collection, creating a space in which the relationship between art and nature remains fluid, while the chronological overview becomes more organic and cyclical, focusing on anticipatory gestures and the durational qualities of poetic traces.

The umbrella term land art encompasses a wide range of closely related and overlapping practices. Its meaning extends across performance, environmental aesthetics, ecology, artivism, and ritualized forms of behavior. In this sense, the exhibition points to a diverse field in which art and life continuously meet, interact, and challenge one another.

The exhibition can also be approached as a reflection on the end of modernism. Various artistic responses demonstrate how artists critically articulated their reactions to social crises from the 1960s to the present.

Land art emerged as a movement in the late 1960s in America and is linked to several other movements that flourished at the time, including Minimal art, Arte Povera, Happenings, Performance art, and Conceptual art. However, in the Eastern European context, similar motivations that shaped the emergence of land art in the Western world appeared even earlier, at the beginning of the 1960s. These included efforts to connect artistic practice with the public, to situate artworks in urban spaces, to provoke dialogue, and to propose large-scale projects that were often not intended to be realized materially, but rather to explore ideas of environmental change.

Biographies of the participants

OVIDIU ŢICHINDELEANU is a Romanian philosopher, translator and culture theorist, writing on critical social theory, decolonial thought, alternative epistemologies, histories of senses and the cultural history of socialism and post-socialism.
In 2021, he co-founded The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life – a collective project growing on a plot of land in the village of Silistea Snagovului, 40 km north of Bucharest. He is a member of the Editorial Board of L’Internationale Online, co-editor of IDEA. Arts + Society magazine, and part of the fluid curatorial frame The Resurrection Committee, aimed at curating research exhibitions that offer historical apertures from which to construct other narratives than the dominant ones of the moment.

VERA LAUF is an art historian and curator. She is a research associate at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and previously held the position of research curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (gfzk) in Leipzig. Before that, she directed the program Well Connected – Curatorial Practice in the 21^stCentury, organized in collaboration with the master’s program Cultures of the Curatorial at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig), where she also completed her doctoral dissertation. In both her research and curatorial work, she engages with practices at the intersection of art and design, exploring questions of education and mediation as well as the field of exhibition-making and the archive.

REGINA BITTNER is Head of the Academy and Deputy Director of the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. Her work focuses on transcultural modernism in design, architecture, and Bauhaus studies, and she has curated numerous exhibitions on the Bauhaus and the cultural history of modernity, including the permanent collection display “Versuchsstätte Bauhaus. The Collection” at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau.
In her research, she combines cultural-anthropological approaches to architectural and design theory with questions of decolonisation, transcultural modernity, and critical heritage, as well as their application in teaching and curatorial practice. Since 2019, she has been an honorary professor at the Institute for Art History and Archaeology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and from 2021 to 2022 she was a visiting professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig.

MAJA VARDJAN is a curator and the current director of the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana. Her research focuses on Slovenian architecture and design of the twentieth century, as well as contemporary creative practices. She has co-curated numerous exhibitions and projects, including Is Nature Modern? Ecological Perspectives in MAO Collection 1930 –1979, Plečnik and Contemporaneity: Glossary, The World Inside: Designing Modern Interiors, 1930–Today, MADE IN: Crafts and Design Narratives, Stanko Kristl: Humanity and Space, Saša J. Mächtig: Systems, Structures, Strategies, and BIO 25: Faraway, So Close, for which she received the ICOM Slovenia Award. Since 2022, she has served as Commissioner of the Slovenian Pavilion at the International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

VESNA MEŠTRIĆ is the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb.
Her work focuses on contemporary art, avant-garde and postmodern movements in art and architecture, as well as new media in museum presentation. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including the retrospective Vjenceslav Richter: Rebel with a Vision, and participated in projects such as Bauhaus – Networking Ideas and Practice, From Imagination to Animation, and the educational project Runaway Art.
She received the annual award of the Croatian Society of Art Historians for the best exhibition in 2017. She also completed professional training at the Museum of Modern Art in a workshop on the preservation of media art, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

DARKO FRITZ is an artist, independent curator, and researcher whose work connects contemporary art, media art, and network culture, exploring glitches, errors, and surveillance. Recently, he has focused on horticultural installations in public spaces. His research on New Tendencies and early computer art gained international recognition through exhibitions at Neue Galerie Graz (2007) and ZKM | Center for Art and Media (2009). He authored Digital Art in Croatia (1968–1984) (2021) and co-edited A Little-Known Story About a Movement… (MIT Press / ZKM, 2011). Fritz is the founder and programme director of grey) (area, established in 2006.

SILVIO VUJIČIĆ is an artist who deals with the topics of clothing fetishes, identity, painting pigments, gardens, toxic and psychoactive substances and transience. His projects rely on myths, alchemical records, art, and fashion history which he decomposes into chemical, symbolic, social, and political elements linking history and modernity. He works in the media of graphics, sculpture, installations, and performances that mark the processes of transformation of matter through emergence or disappearance. The material he uses is rare, dangerous, or ephemeral, like extracts from plants, pure caffeine, or perfume from body secretions, and he makes it according to his recipes by chemical laboratory methods of crystallization, distillation, extraction, and sublimation.

IVAN SKVRCE Ivan Skvrce is a visual artist, educator, and Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb whose work explores the intersections of contemporary art, pedagogy, and critical cultural practice. Since 2007 he has been a member of the ABS Group, an art collective focused on participatory, collaborative, and politically engaged artistic practices. Alongside his artistic work, he has led and developed educational and research projects connecting visual arts, experimental pedagogy, and interdisciplinary learning, including international initiatives funded through Erasmus+ and the European Social Fund. His work often investigates how artistic processes can function as tools for critical reflection, social dialogue, and the transformation of educational environments.

ANA ŠKEGRO is a senior curator currently working as the head of the Experimental and Research Department and head of the Media Art Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (MSU). She has been working as a curator, producer, and project manager on various cultural and community projects since 2013. From 2017 until 2021 she was curator of international projects and head of the Education Department at the MSU. She has (co)curated and organized numerous exhibitions and projects, most recently including The Visible Ones project (2023-2025), exhibitions The Smell of Freshly Copped Wood (2024-2025), and Jan St. Werner: Vibraception - Investigations in Wavespace (2024-2025), as well as EU projects The Arts of Resistance (2024-2025), The Museum of the Commons (2023-2027) and Shaken Grounds (2026-2027).

JASMINA FUČKAN is an art historian and curator, the Head of the Sculpture Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Alongside Suzana Marjanić and Nataša Ivančević, she is a member of the curatorial team for the exhibition Natura Po-etica.
Previously, during her many years at the Museum of Arts and Crafts, Zagreb (2004 – 2025), she curated the exihibition programme Contemporary Artist in Permanent Display of Museum of Arts and Crafts (2009 – 2020).

Expert Forum
ART, ENVIRONMENT, AND CRITICAL THOUGHT
20 May 2026
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

Bauhaus Ecologies: Art, Environment and Critical Thought in Eastern and Southeastern Europe

Bauhaus Ecologies: Art, Environment and Critical Thought in Eastern and Southeastern Europe

20.05.2026 - 20.05.2026 / MSU