This episode tries to articulate that the work of any art  institution is political. Whether we consciously acknowledge and engage with this fact or prefer to ignore it, the outcomes of our actions in the public sphere inevitably shapes the policies of the field  we work in and, more broadly, the world we live in. Some institutions choose to play by existing rules and benefit from obedience. But this conversation is about the institution that chose another path.

Here Asia Tsisar speaks to Maria Hlavajova, organizer, researcher, pedagogue, curator and the founding director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht.  After 25 years of work, BAK has been defunded this year by both the city of Utrecht and the Dutch National Arts Council and it currently remains closed. Radio Unheard invited Maria to speak about the legacy of BAK of power of imagination and about the distinction between being political and doing things politically. 

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Maria Hlavajova has been the founding general and artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, since 2000. In 2008-2016 she was research and artistic director of FORMER WEST, which she initiated and developed as an internationally collaborative research, education, publication and exhibition project, culminating in the publication Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 (co-edited with Simon Sheikh, 2017). Hlavajova has instigated and (co-)organised numerous projects at BAK and beyond, including the series Propositions for Non-Fascist Living(2017-ongoing), Future Vocabularies (2014-2017), and New World Academy (with artist Jonas Staal, 2013-2016), among many other international research projects. In 2011, Hlavajova organised the Roma Pavilion entitled Call the Witness at the 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, and in 2007 she curated the Dutch Pavilion entitled Citizens and Subjects at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice. In 2000, Hlavajova co-curated Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, entitled Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defence. Hlavajova is also co-founder (with Kathrin Rhomberg) of the tranzit network, a foundation that supports exchange and contemporary art practices in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. She was a faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (1998–2002), and director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts in Bratislava (1994–1999).

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht is a base for art, theory, and social action. BAK is committed to the notion of art as a public sphere and a political space, and provides a critical platform for aesthetico-political experiments with and through art. BAK brings together artists, thinkers, and other members of the precarious classes to imagine and enact transformative ways of being together otherwise. BAK Basecamp collective 2025: Jeanne van Heeswijk, Lisanne van Vucht, Alejandro Navarete Cortés, Esther Dascha Westra, Grace Lostia, Stichting Spoorloos, Collored Qollective, New Women Connectors, Triwish Hanoeman, Merve Bedir, Sophie Mak-Schram, Iliada Charalambous, Sandra Lange, Joy Mariama Smith, Dina Mohamed, Molemo Moiloa, Laura Raicovich, Jonas Staal, Mick Wilson, Raidan Abdul Baqi Shamsan, Mustapha Eaisaouiyen, Ehsan Fardjadniya, a.o. 

https://www.bakonline.org

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It has been a long road to organize this conversation and Radio Unheard is deeply grateful to Yulia Elias, Dutch Culture and Ukrainian Institute for connections, moments and conversations that made this episode possible.

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Radio Unheard is supported by the European Union under the ⁠House of Europe⁠ programme.

The content is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Want the full story? Visit⁠⁠ radiounheard.org⁠⁠  to explore each episode and subscribe to the newsletter, so you don't miss anything.

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In this podcast, we often advocate for doable, sustainable solutions. We have spoken extensively about the notion of crisis and why solidarity should not be understood as a spontaneous gesture toward someone in trouble, but rather as a consistent policy within the cultural field.

In this episode, Asia Tsisar speaks with Marita Muukkonen and Ivor Stodolsky, the founders of Artists at Risk, a network with more than a decade of experience providing temporary relocations for artists and cultural professionals at risk.

This episode is very practical. It focuses on concrete steps that cultural and funding institutions can implement in their policies. And, as with any practice, it contains both inspiration and disagreements. But it is only through practice that we can turn solidarity from a word into action. 

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Artists at Risk - has become known as the “go-to” institution for artists and cultural professionals at risk. Perpetuum Mobile, which runs ARTISTS at RISK, is a non-profit organisation active at the intersection of human rights and the arts. Since 2013, Perpetuum Mobile has developed Artists at Risk to become a mondial network of artistic institutions, non-profits, municipalities, state institutions and international organisations to assist, relocate and fund artists who are at risk of persecution or oppression, or are fleeing war or terror. Since 2013, Artists at Risk has relocated and funded over 1,100 artists and cultural professionals (principals, not counting family and dependents) at over 330 partner institutions globally. The Helsinki-based Artists at Risk-Secretariat coordinates the online efforts of the global AR-Team. 

⁠Artists at Risk webpage⁠

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Radio Unheard is supported by the European Union under the ⁠⁠House of Europe⁠⁠ programme.

The content is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Want the full story? Visit⁠⁠⁠ radiounheard.org⁠⁠⁠  to explore each episode and subscribe to the newsletter, so you don't miss anything.

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What role do exhibitions play in moments of crisis? Can curatorial practices go beyond representation to become acts of solidarity in themselves?

In this episode of Radio Unheard, Asia Tsisar speaks with Aleksei Borisionok and Antonina Stebur, both are recognized curators active in the international art field, who come from a Belarusian background. Together, they reflect on the challenges faced after the 2020–2021 protests, the difficulties of working in exile, and the shifting dynamics it produces. We explore how exhibitions can create horizontal relations and practices of dialogue with communities in challenging situations.

Drawing on their projects — Every Day at Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv and Senses of Safety at Yermilov Center in Kharkiv — we discuss how solidarity can be practiced through exhibition-making, and how such gestures may resonate beyond the walls of the institution.

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Aleksei Borisionok is a curator, writer, and organizer who currently lives and works in Vienna. He is a member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective and the Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. He writes about art and politics for various magazines, catalogs, and online platforms such as e-flux Journal, L’Internationale Online, Partisan, Springerin, and Paletten, among many others. He is currently a fellow at the Vera List Center in New York, and, together with Katalin Erdődi, he was co-curating the Matter of Art Biennale in Prague (2024).

Antonina Stebur is a curator, researcher, and editor exploring contemporary art as a tool of infrastructural and political imagination. She founded Mycelium [Грыбнiца], a decolonial research lab, and is editor-in-chief of the AWC Journal. She has contributed to documenta 15, the Venice Biennale, and Theatertreffen Berlin. Her current curatorial project, developed with Joanna Kordjak and Taras Gembik, is the exhibition What Are Our Collective Dreams? at Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw. Her research introduces the concept of “infrastructural art,” focusing on artistic practices that intervene in broken systems through operational rather than representational tactics.

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Radio Unheard is supported by the European Union under the ⁠House of Europe⁠ programme.

The content is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Want the full story? Visit⁠⁠ radiounheard.org⁠⁠  to explore each episode and subscribe to the newsletter, so you don't miss anything.

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In this episode, we talk about the networks of solidarity created by independent art institutions and artists during the Yugoslav wars—networks that aimed to preserve and develop artistic connections between people divided by wars.

Our guest is Ana Miljanić, head and co-founder of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade. During the wars, the Centre hosted an exhibition of Kosovo artists in the heart of the Serbian capital. After the war, it became a space for archiving and rethinking what that war had done—to people, to memory, to language.

I’ll admit it: somewhere in the back of my mind, I hoped this conversation would give me a toolkit. Practical examples of solidarity we could use and apply today. But no conversation in the Balkans goes according to script.

Instead, Ana offers something harder—How to think and feel in order to never stop thinking and feeling. How to return to interrupted conversations. How to speak across the identities imposed on us.

For those for whom war was a formative experience, many moments in this dialogue will feel familiar. But Ana also helps answer a deeper, often unspoken question: Can we look at the experience of war and see something beyond the stigma? And can that insight help us find new ways to navigate the world beyond it?

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Ana Miljanić is the theater director, co-founder and program director of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD) in Belgrade, Serbia. CZKD is a nonprofit cultural institution whose work is based on critical thinking, and cultural and artistic production. Through cultural and social engagement, which has included thousands of people, CZKD articulates initiatives of politization and repolitization of public space, culture and art.

www.czkd.org

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Radio Unheard is supported by the European Union under the ⁠House of Europe⁠ programme.

The content is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Want the full story? Visit⁠⁠ radiounheard.org⁠⁠  to explore each episode and subscribe to the newsletter, so you don't miss anything.

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In this episode, we discuss the importance of solidarity among people with experiences of displacement and delve into both its imaginaries and its structural boundaries.

This episode has two parts. The first part, in conversation with Ukrainian social anthropologist Ruslana Koziienko, examines the mechanisms of EU protection from the perspective of displaced Ukrainians, as well as the legal and social barriers to solidarity among people with experiences of displacement.

In the second part, Dr. Zeynep Şahin Mencütek helps us place this problem in a broader context and examines the general trends in the erosion of protection for displaced people worldwide. This conversation explores the historical development of the Temporary Protection system, the political and humanitarian challenges it addresses, and the particularities of how it is implemented in different countries across the globe.

Both parts of this episode are already available on any platform where you get your podcasts.

Zeynep Sahin Mencutek holds a PhD in Political and International Relations and currently serves as a Senior Researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies in Germany. She has published dozens of articles, book chapters, reports and commentaries addressing different aspects of migration and politics. Currently, she co-leads a project on Return migration. Her first book is Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East (Routledge) and her recent co-edited  book is Migration and Cities (Springer Press) from 2024.

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Radio Unheard is supported by the European Union under the ⁠House of Europe⁠ programme.

The content is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Want the full story? Visit⁠⁠ radiounheard.org⁠⁠  to explore each episode and subscribe to the newsletter, so you don't miss anything.

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In this episode, host Asia Tsisar speaks with social anthropologist Ruslana Koziienko about the importance of solidarity between displaced people. They discuss the Temporary Protection status, which displaced people from Ukraine were given in the EU at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Conversation explores the concept of fake generosity, which Ruslana suggests in her opinion piece Against false solidarity. A call for true solidarity among people with experiences of displacement, and which discusses how certain forms of aid — intentionally or not — hinder meaningful exchange and solidarity between forcibly displaced people from different regions. Ruslana’s text also touches upon the special education programs developed to support Ukrainian students and scholars across Europe and how universities might overcome those divisions to create more inclusive and transformative environments.

This episode has two parts. This is the first one. The second part, in conversation with Dr. Zeynep Şahin Mencütek we try to place this problem in a broader context and examine the general trends of the erosion of protection for displaced people worldwide.

Both parts of this episode are already available on any platform where you get your podcasts.

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Ruslana Koziienko is a Ukrainian social anthropologist and PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University (Vienna). Her research interests include citizenship, gender, masculinities, and displacement. She is also part of the research group working on the project “Arrival" Infrastructures: Processes of Emplacement of Displaced People from Ukraine in Vienna, which was launched by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, Vienna) within its Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration. The project explores the response of the city of Vienna to the mass influx of displaced people from Ukraine.

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Radio Unheard is supported by the European Union under the ⁠House of Europe⁠ programme.

The content is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Want the full story? Visit⁠⁠ radiounheard.org⁠⁠  to explore each episode and subscribe to the newsletter, so you don't miss anything.

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Solidarity is the word we pronounce proudly in exhibitions and public programs. But the doubts — about its long-term effects, about how and why we divide people, about solidarity as a gift, gesture, or hierarchy — are usually left for professional conversations we prefer to keep privat.

In the opening episode of Radio Unheard, host Asia Tsisar speaks with writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza, whose recent book Imperfect Solidarities lends its title to this episode. Together, they explore empathy as the emotional foundation of solidarity — and the unsettling ethical situations it can produce.

The conversation focuses on social media as a tool for transmitting and demanding empathy, the burden placed on victims to perform and explain their suffering for a global audience, and the competition for emotional attention. It also touches on the pressure for victims to be “understandable” within international frameworks — to translate their experience into universally relatable terms in order to be heard, helped, or remembered.

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Aruna D’Souza is a critic who is interested in how art can offer ideas for navigating an increasingly untenable world. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times and 4Columns, and has contributed to numerous books and exhibition catalogues. Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited) was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. Her most recent book is Imperfect Solidarities (Floating Opera Press) from 2024.

⁠⁠www.arunadsouza.com⁠⁠

⁠Instagram⁠

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Radio Unheard is supported by the European Union under the ⁠House of Europe⁠ programme.

The content is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Want the full story? Visit⁠⁠ radiounheard.org⁠⁠  to explore each episode and subscribe to the newsletter, so you don't miss anything.

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Solidarity is one of the most talked-about—and most needed—words in contemporary art today. It’s also one of the most confusing, underdefined, and quietly controversial. We love to invoke it. But do we really know what we mean by it—or what we’re doing when we act in its name?

In this debut season, Radio Unheard dives into the murky waters of solidarity—not just as a moral impulse, but as a historical practice, a cultural tool, and sometimes, let’s be honest, a performance. We look at how solidarity has been shaped, stretched, and sometimes broken across time and space—from archival alliances of the past to improvised gestures of support today. Along the way, we ask: how do we build solidarity? On what ground? And who gets to stand on it?

This season is not about calling out or cheering on. It’s about slowing down to think: What are the long-term effects of our cultural responses? Are we actually building something—systems, networks, structures—or are we just reacting in the moment? 

The first episode – Imperfect Solidarities featuring Aruna D'Souza – will be available on all major podcast platforms starting June 27, 2025.

Want the full story? Visit radiounheard.org  to explore each episode and subscribe to the newsletter, so you don't miss anything.

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Radio Unheard is supported by the European Union under the House of Europe programme.

The content is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.