Ana Dević / WHW

Ana Dević is a curator, educator, and writer based in Zagreb, Croatia. Dević is a member of What, How & for Whom/WHW curatorial collective formed in 1999. Its founding members are curators Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. From 2003 to 2023, WHW ran a program at the city-owned gallery Gallery Nova in Zagreb. In 2018, WHW launched an experimental education program for emerging artists WHW Akademija. WHW collective was awarded with Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory in 2008 and Croatian Section of the International Association of Art Critics in 2022. In August 2024, Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović were appointed as Artistic Directors of the next edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster, to be held in 2027. Ana Dević was a member of the organizational team of the 9th International Degrowth Conference, in Zagreb, 2023. She has contributed to many cultural magazines and exhibition catalogues. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Zadar. Her poetry book "Ninety-nine contributions to breathing" was published in 2024. Since 2019 she has been a guest professor at MA program in Visual Art and Curatorial studies at NABA, Milan.

Collective Curating: Positioning and Intervening Practices

Drawing from more than two decades of practice within the What, How & for Whom / WHW curatorial collective, the talk examines how collectivity can operate not only as a curatorial methodology, but also an organizational model and form of cultural infrastructure. This presentation reflects on collective curating as a form of positioning: a way of thinking, working, and producing knowledge together within changing social, political, and institutional conditions. Collective curating often emerges from the necessity to rethink dominant structures of authorship, expertise, and institutional authority. Like a living body composed of bones, muscles, and connective tissue, collective practices are sustained through different forms of labor, attachment, and relationality. Through WHW’s exhibitions and a long-term educational platform WHW Akademija, alongside a number of examples of different forms of collectivity that have shaped the local context, my presentation explores how collective curating creates spaces for alternative forms of institutional practice. It asks how collectivity can build infrastructures of knowledge exchange, particularly in contexts marked by political uncertainty, shrinking cultural resources, and the increasing precarization of cultural work. The presentation proposes collective curating as a practice of positioning oneself with others: a way of creating shared ground while imagining more sustainable forms of cultural production.