Outside of what I can see, framed within my window
The exhibition project was developed by Nataša Ilić and Ivet Ćurlín (WHW) with the students of their two-year program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in close collaboration with the Kontakt Collection.
The exhibition Outside of what I can see, framed within my window borrows its title from the sprawling, language-bending novel by Alexander Hamon “The World and All That It Holds” (2023) that takes the reader on a hundred years long journey across time and continents, starting from Sarajevo and Vienna and ending in Shanghai, exploring topics of love, friendship, solidarity, war, migration and enduring hope. It presents four women artists whose practices explore notions of belonging and diasporic European experience: Alma Bektaš (b. 1992 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives in Vienna), Lana Čmajčanin (b. in 1983 in Sarajevo, lives in Vienna), Mila Panić (b. 1991 in Brčko, lives in Berlin), and Selma Selman (b. 1991 in Bihać, lives in Amsterdam and Berlin).
The focus on diasporic experience, beyond addressing the active role of the West in the turmoil of the Yugoslav Wars, in whose aftermath all four artists grew up and developed their artistic practice, looks into topics and questions from a more distant Austrian past, but it also draws attention to its current geopolitical entanglements. Bosnia and Herzegovina happens to be the only formal Austro-Hungarian colony, occupied in 1878, annexed in 1908, and lost less than a decade later at the end of the First World War, through which the Empire not totally unexpectedly lost itself too. Today, Bosnia is at heart of the Balkan Route, a way for migrants to move around Europe to seek asylum, instigated by the wars in Syria and Iraq, active since 2012, and most likely to be intensified. Looking at Bosnia and Herzegovina as a borderland of Europe offers unique perspective at the historical and present formation of Whiteness and strategies of inclusion and exclusion it entails.
Presented artists engage with diasporic experiences actively, even confrontationally, and shed light on interwoven and unequal histories that shape our present. In contrast to the broad and exclusionary sweep of (any) national story, the exhibition engages with the question of twisting of history into a single narrative of nation building and everything that is erased, washed over or justified along the way. Outside of what I can see, framed within my window explores notions of relationality as a way to allow different kinds of mutual dependencies and responsibilities for the future.
Program
You Have No Idea
Performance by Selma Selman
Friday, 29 May 2026, 18 h, Schillerplatz (1010 Vienna)
Opening of the exhibition
Friday, 29 May 2026, 19 h, Library of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna)
Jokes
stand-up comedy by Mila Panić
Monday, 1 June 2026, 19 h, Library of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna)
Outside of what I can see, framed within my window…
Film program
Tuesday, 2 June 2026, 18 h, Blickle Kino (Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Vienna)
Curated by Hana Ćurak and Asija Ismailovski