Identity Crisis Network

ORGANIZERS:
Identity Crisis Network (Luka Cvetković, Klara Petrović, Michalina Sablik, Luja Šimunović and Vera Zalutskaya)

LOCATION:
Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia

Free admission

Register here

The first international conference organized under the research project “Identity Crisis Network” will take place in Zagreb in May 2025. Following the open call, we have invited 20 scholars, curators, artists, and other individuals and collectives to join in the conversation that seeks to challenge established notions of identity and subjectivity in contemporary art and culture.

In the past few decades, the concept of identity has been marked as a fixed political determination. Given the term’s inherent fluidity, diversity, multiplicity, and ambiguity, attempts to narrowly define it have proven restrictive, stretching its boundaries and ultimately causing them to burst. Practices aimed at making marginalized groups visible in the art world have often led to compartmentalization or tokenization, deepening polarization and provoking culture wars within art institutions, as well as outside them. This position opens up space for questioning the very foundations of contemporary art practices and their potential to generate transformative experiences beyond normative and constraining limits. The “Identity Crisis Network” conference seeks to explore whether it is possible to move beyond established identity categories and simplified labels, both in cultural and political discourse. We aim to engage with these issues not through a one-sided critique but by examining the potential to generate change within the realm of art. Through this conference, we reflect on the philosophical, institutional, aesthetic, and political landscape we inhabit as artists, curators, and theorists, intending to envision new spaces where potential and contingent outcomes can emerge.

Bill Balaskas

Will my crisis identity fix my identity crisis?

Suzana Milevska

The Clusivity of ‘We’: In solidarity with the different and the (im)possibility of the first person plural

Mark Cinkevich

Belarus, Memory, and Identity after 2020 

Ying Sze Pek

Identity Crises in Contemporary German Art

by Svitlana Matviyenko

Proliferating Terror Environments and Their Subjects: From Donbas and Chornobyl through Bucha to Kakhovka

Salim Bayri

Hadra Colider

Agata Wieczorek

Matrixial Bumps:
Re-thinking borders and belonging through empty wombs

Simon(e) van Saarloos

Trans Existence Without Defense

Hana Janečková

Anna Daučíková and Women’s Association ASPEKT: Alliances Beyond Identity in Recent and Contemporary Art

by Jack Halberstam

Anarchitecture After Everything

Mårten Spångberg

Different in Kind is Void of Identity

Mohammad Salemy

Category Theory & Differential Identities

Darko Vukić

Masobaby and the unborn monument

Boris Ondreička

AD HOC / THE SECOND CONTEMPOR-ARY 

12:00–13:00

Coffee Break

13:00–14:30

by Simon O'Sullivan

Writing, Performance and Myth-Work

14:30–15:30

Lunch Break

15:30–18:00

Panel 4: Playing the Self Beyond Algorithms

Klara Kofen

To the truest of hearts - Algorithmic Authenticity and the Digital Baroque

& Brandon Rosenbluth

Reflections on/from ARIA

Scott Wark

Playing at being someone online: (Digital) subject-formation as aesthetic practice

Xtreme Girl

Hands turned into fingertips, fingertips spiraled into the chaos

18:00–18:15

Coffee Break

18:15–19:45

by Anna Longo

A personal artwork or a personal brand? Identity and reification.

19:45–20:00

If you have any questions  contact us at hello@identitycrisisnetwork.com