Biljana Ciric

BILJANA CIRIC is an interdependent curator.

She curated and initiated retrospective of Vietnamese pioneering figure, artist, curator, activist, Tran Luong- Tam Ta- Soaked in the Long Rain co-organised by Art Jameel, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre and The Art Gallery of Western Australia (on tour 2025-2027). Currently on the view is also an exhibition and research on Artists books as Medium in China presented by ASE Foundation, Shanghai.

Ciric is curator of the Pavilion of Republic of Serbia at 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 presenting with Walking with Water Solo exhibition of Vladimir Nikolic.

She is conceiving inquiry for first Trans- Southeast Asian Triennial in Guang Zhou Repetition as a Gesture Towards Deep Listening (2021/2022)

She was the co-curator of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, 2015), curator in residency at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, 2015), and a research fellow at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Høvikodden, 2016). Her recent exhibitions include An Inquiry: Modes of Encounter presented by Times Museum, Guang Zhou (2019); When the Other Meets the Other Other presented by Cultural Center Belgrade (2017); Proposals for Surrender presented by McAM in Shanghai (2016/2017); and This exhibition Will Tell You Everything About FY Art Foundations in FY Art Foundation space in Shen Zhen (2017).

In 2013, Ciric initiated the seminar platform From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition Making with focus on China and Southeast Asia. The assembly platform was hosted by St Paul St Gallery, AUT, New Zealand (2013), Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2018), Times Museum, Guang Zhou (2019). The book with the same name was published by Sternberg Press in 2019 and was awarded best art publication in China in 2020.
Her research on artists organized exhibitions in Shanghai was published in the book History in Making; Shanghai: 1979-2006 published by CFCCA; and Life and Deaths of Institutional Critique, co-edited by Nikita Yingqian Cai and published by Black Dog Publishing, among others.

In 2018 she established the educational platform What Could/Should Curating Do? She was nominated for the ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award (2012).

Ciric initiated a long-term project reflecting on China’s Belt and Road Initiative titled As you go . . . the roads under your feet, towards a new future. She holds PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne.

Positioning

As Sara Ahmed says, it is critical to articulate how you arrive at your work, and so I will attempt to situate myself starting presentation with positioning. The sharing will tempt to tease following threads of interest: tensions between margins and centres, a balance between opacity and visibility, undervalued curatorial and artistic gestures, embracing failure as a learning process, proximity as a condition for knowledge production, and how these knowledges are disseminated locally and globally. These questions emerged as core to the curatorial ethics, responsibilities and sensibilities engaged when practice curatorial.