To mark its 30th anniversary, the World of Art School (SCCA-Ljubljana) is granting the Award for Curatorial Practices for the first time this year. The award recognises outstanding achievements in curatorial practices in contemporary visual arts and is intended for curators active within the Slovenian cultural space, as well as Slovenian curators working abroad.
It is granted in partnership with Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) and Cukrarna/MGML, joined by the Celje Regional Museum/Center of Contemporary Art Celje as guest partner for the 2026/27 period.
The recipients were selected from 13 applications by a four-member jury consisting of Mara Anjoli Vujić, Ivana Bago, Lea Vene, and Vladimir Vidmar.
Large Award for Curatorial Practices 2026: Tjaša Pogačar
Tjaša Pogačar is an independent curator of contemporary art based between Ljubljana and Prague. Her work explores how artistic and curatorial practices respond to technological and ecological shifts. She has curated the 34th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, the International Festival of Computer Arts Maribor, and exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Kunstraum Niederösterreich Vienna, SUMO Prague, Cukrarna, Škuc Gallery, Švicarija (MGLC) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, among others. She is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of Šum journal and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History and Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, researching exhibition-making as a collective world(build)ing practice.
Jury statement:
Tjaša Pogačar's curatorial practice engages with the issues of advanced computational technologies and the accelerating effects of climate change in the field of contemporary visual arts. She experiments with speculative approaches to art and theory, exploring fiction's potential to imagine alternative realities within art systems. Drawing on speculative fiction, live-action role-play (LARP), and critical design, her projects develop the exhibition-making practice into a collective, more-than-human practice of worldbuilding. Pogačar's work as an independent curator is inseparable from her editorial and theoretical work with ŠUM, a journal for art and theory-fiction, which forms an integral part of the emphatically hybrid platforms her work sustains and inhabits. Her projects demonstrate consistent engagement with, and support for, the emerging artistic practices from Central and Eastern Europe, contributing to the development of local institutional frameworks. Projects such as ISKRA DELTA (34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts), Plaza Protocol or ARIA (Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly) best exemplify her curatorial vision, which transforms the exhibition into a nuanced network of relations that constantly challenge the boundaries of curatorial engagement. Both authorial and collective, and often framed as an ambivalent, impermanent, self-regulating system, her practice responds to the instabilities, complexities and paradoxes of the world we inhabit, proposing alternative configurations of relations within the art system and the wider social body.
Small Award for Curatorial Practices 2026: Marko Vivoda
Marko Vivoda is a curator, producer, and intermedia and light artist. He is a co-founder of the informal art collective Stran 22 and the IZZA festival, as well as a co-founder of Festival IZIS, which he curated for eleven editions. Through this work, he has played a significant role in shaping the contemporary and intermedia art scene in Istria. He curated the Lighting Guerrilla festival, co-curated Towards a Humane Technology, the showcase exhibition of the Network of Art and Cultural Research Centers – RUK (Cankarjev dom, 2023), and curated Spaceship from Hope at Ars Electronica (2024). He is creative director of the HEKA laboratory at the PiNA association. He collaborates with the Faculty of Education, University of Primorska, and is currently focusing his curatorial and production work on new generations of artists.
Jury statement:
Marko Vivoda’s curatorial practice is distinguished by its sustained commitment to activating new spaces and developing cultural infrastructure for contemporary art beyond established institutional centres. As a co-founder and long-standing curator of the IZIS Festival since 2013, he has helped establish an intermedia art scene on the Slovenian Coast, transforming spaces such as the Libertas Warehouse and the Bastion Fort in Koper into venues for artistic production, presentation and exchange. In doing so, he has helped decentralize contemporary art by opening space for it outside Ljubljana. His curatorial approach builds on his experience as an intermedia artist and scenographer, which has shaped his understanding of the exhibition as an open-ended process that treats space as an active curatorial medium and emphasizes the visitor’s experience. Equally important is the commitment to reduce the environmental impact of exhibition-making through the reuse of materials, working with existing resources and questioning the culture of constant production. Vivoda’s hybrid practice is informed by the tradition of curating intermedia arts, but even more prominently by community-building, stemming from his embeddedness in the local artist scene and his multifaceted exchange with it.
Award Ceremony
The awards will be presented on Friday, 11 December 2026, in the evening at Cukrarna. The morning programme at Moderna galerija will feature lectures by two speakers chosen by the recipients, to be announced soon.
Organisation: World of Art School / SCCA-Ljubljana
Partners: Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Cukrarna/MGML, Celje Regional Museum/Center of Contemporary Art Celje
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
