ISTANBUL—Imagine a world where our most urgent political, social, and economic issues are elucidated and debated within the public sphere — through an engagement with contemporary art. For the last decade, the Zagreb-based curatorial collective What, How & for Whom (Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović) has been transforming this fantasy into a vital reality through a tenacious, multifaceted approach that unites exhibition-making with a wide range of discursive practices (including lectures, screenings, public discussions, and publications). This interview was conducted with WHW’s Ivet Ćurlin via email shortly after the opening of their latest curatorial endeavor, the 11th Istanbul Biennial, titled "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" (Read a review of the Biennial here.)

David Spalding: Let’s go back to WHW’s formation in Zagreb in 1999. What were the particular cultural conditions in Croatia at that time that shaped your thinking about what WHW should be?

Ivet Ćurlin: In the late 1990s, when WHW started working together, Croatia’s right-wing, nationalistic politics had finally started to loosen their grip. We felt that there might be a space for us to express our deep discontent with the governing ideas on art and politics. In a cultural landscape characterized by the bureaucratic sluggishness and conceptual disorientation of institutions that sprang up in the 1990s, in the confusion of the so-called “transition,” with its rediscovery of capitalism, crumbling social infrastructure, the quest for the holy grail of national identity, and the complete suppression of socialist history, we felt intellectually closer to the civil society scene that developed in the ‘90s than to a system of art institutions. Arkzin, which started in 1991 as a fanzine for Croatia’s Antiwar Campaign, was especially important for WHW as a forum for independent critical debate. In 1998, Arkzin published a 150th-anniversary edition of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, with an introduction by Slavoj Žižek, and they approached one of us to organize a contemporary art exhibition that would trigger public debate on issues related to the Manifesto, since the publishing of the book didn't generate any reaction.

All four of us studied art history and comparative literature at the University of Humanities in Zagreb. We knew each other, and we were all individually involved in cultural projects such as radio journalism, writing on art, and curating, but what really brought us together was the possibility to organize an exhibition addressing the Communist Manifesto. This immediately seemed like an opportunity to intervene in the art field on all levels, in terms of content, obviously, and organizational know-how, as well as in terms of assessing and building local and international contexts, which were goals not only beyond our individual capacities, but actually opposed to individualistic understandings of cultural work.

From the beginning, we were aware that collaboration enables us to do things that none of us individually would be able to do: to create and influence new spaces and modalities of art production, thus challenging the environment of ossified and closed art institutions in Croatia at that moment.

The resulting exhibition, What, How & for Whom, on the occasion of the 152nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, was realized in 2000. As curators, how did you approach such a complex, loaded subject?

We devised this project as a collaboration between Arkzin, the Croatian Association of Artists, and a self-organized multimedia institute called mi2 — all from Zagreb. In this complex collaboration, we acted as a curatorial collective, and with these three partners we organized the exhibition. It was a really ambitious task to make an exhibition on the anniversary of a book of such powerful ideological and political history and potential, particularly within a society that has collectively mystified and obliterated the archive of politics, economics, and style of the failed project of socialist society. We started from the fact that today the Manifesto is domesticated, a harmless cultural artifact. But then again, as Boris Buden wrote in his text for the exhibition publication, “Not a revolutionary politics, but culture is today the only field of political struggle.” With that in mind, although we started with the experience of Croatian post-socialism and linked it to other post-socialist societies within Eastern Europe, it was important to us to claim the Communist Manifesto as a universal cultural and political heritage, particularly when neo-liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy still seemed to many like the only “natural” and acceptable solution and the optimal norm of political consciousness.