Ruba Salameh, Yamm (Open sea) (2016, 9'17")
Between August 24 and 31, the fourth international Summer School will take place, this time under the title Revolutionary Roads. Destination: Comradeship.
The 4th edition of the Summer School organized jointly by the Moderna galerija (Ljubljana), the Museum of African Art (Belgrade), and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro (Podgorica), will offer a nomadic learning experience, traveling through three cities in the Balkans—Ljubljana, Belgrade, and Podgorica—while exploring the legacy of Yugoslav socialism, solidarity work actions, antifascist monuments, and the cultural connections of the Non-Aligned Movement. This journey will include lectures, workshops, discussions, and performances, with a special focus on “locally situated knowledge.” The participants will engage with three distinctive museum collections that challenge traditional Western-centric art histories and canons.
The 2025 Summer School will provide an opportunity to learn from revolutionary ideas of solidarity also in shaping a future world, while also exploring the diverse and often underrepresented narratives of the East and the non-aligned world. Through immersive travel, direct engagement with local experts, and access to off-beat collections, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the region’s complex cultural and political landscape. In addition, the workshops with local artists will enable them to engage in the creative processes of some of the most intriguing art practices in the region, based on research on power relations within the art system, various traditions of experimental and avant-garde film, and archives.
The workshop facilitators and speakers will include: Rana Anani, Zdenka Badovinac, Nada Baković, Sezgin Boynik, Marina Čelebić, Anita Ćulafić, Doplgenger, Merve Elveren, Emilia Epštajn, FOKUS Grupa, Siniša Ilić , Sima Kokotović, Irena Lagator Pejović, Teja Merhar, Ahmet Öğüt, Bojana Piškur, Nemanja Radonjić, Natalija Vujošević, Ivana Zatežić and Beti Žerovc.
Associated partners: Bunker/ Festival Mladi levi, Museum of Yugoslavia and Office for Contemporary Art Aotearoa.
Participants of the Summer School will begin their journey in Ljubljana. Part of the program will be open to the public.
Sunday, 24 August 2025 | 18:00, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM
This talk examines the collapse of boundaries between the arms and entertainment industries, drawing on Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine film series, and Mahmoud Al Haj’s Control Anatomy body of work, and their disturbing echoes in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Farocki traced how, since the Gulf War (1991), militaries have adopted the aesthetics of video games and virtual reality to train soldiers, abstracting violence into clean, distant simulations. Al Haj’s works predicted how this abstraction has become a horrifying reality today, as human lives in Gaza are reduced to data points, thermal images, and surveillances maps.
It argues that the arms industry increasingly draws from the speculative imagination of video games, but also sci-fi media productions, borrowing not just military tools but entire visions of warfare. Technologies, once confined to screens and fiction, now shape real-world killing machines such as talking drones and gamified targeting systems.
One of Black Mirror’s episodes that offers a chilling account for how dehumanizing technologies and narratives enable atrocities, reflects the current reality in Gaza, where entertainment becomes a way to inspire genocide.
Laurie Calhoun’s The End of Military Virtue argues that killing remotely, without risk or confrontation, dissolved the moral responsibility. Soldiers become operators, desensitized and detached, clicking to kill as easily as sending an email or purchasing an online product.
By weaving together artistic critique, popular dystopias, and lived realities in Gaza, this talk asks: What kind of future are we imagining into being? Has science fiction become a blueprint to serve developing these killing machines? And how might we reclaim ethical accountability in an age of mechanized, screen-mediated crimes against humanity?
Rana Anani is a Palestinian curator and writer specializing in visual arts. Her research interests include Palestinian art history, the intersection of visual art with loss, erasure, and archives, as well as the role of art as a tool of solidarity. Anani is currently a fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies and a board member at the Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah. She is the editor of Emergence to Light, the memoir of artist Nabil Anani and Darb Al Ghoul, the memoir of artist Sliman Mansour.
Sunday, 24 August 2025 | 19:30, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM
This film programme presents four powerful video works by Palestinian artists that explore occupation, displacement, memory, and resistance through personal and poetic visual narratives.
The programme is part of the multidisciplinary artistic project War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds, taking place between London and Beirut in 2024 and 2025.
Jumana Emil Abboud | Smuggling Lemons (2006, 20’18”)
Ruba Salameh | Yamm (Open Sea) (2016, 9’17”)
Shada Safadi | Wind Farm (2023, 2’57”)
Manal Mahamid | From Akka to Gaza (2024, 4′)
War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds is curated by Odessa Warren, Reem Shadid (Beirut Art Center), Siegrun Salmanian and Angelina Radaković (The Mosaic Rooms).
Park ŠD Tabor
In collaboration with the international festival Mladi levi
Other Easts
Monday, 25 August 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
Sezgin Boynik and Armin Hokmi, moderated by Bojana Piškur
Questioning the Western canon
Tuesday, 26 August 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
Rana Anani and Lali Pertenava, moderated by Alma R. Selimović
