As you go… roads under your feet towards new future
A talk by Biljana Ciric on transnational curatorial methodologies

Curator Biljana Ciric will share the working methodology of her long-term research inquiry As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future (2019–2022), developed with partner ‘cells’ in Central Asia, China, the Balkans, and East Africa. The project began in response to the geopolitical framework of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and evolved into a transnational network connecting independent practitioners, small-scale organisations, and major state and private museums.

Rather than looking at the BRI from a distance, the project used the practice of ‘walking-with’ the context and with each other, including regular meetings, intensive workshops and seminars. Participants also learnt how to speak nearby (more than about) China, as well as how to speak nearby each other, while searching  for ethically and economically sustainable modes of working within a transnational multi-year inquiry and partners with different levels of resources.

Ciric will discuss how the methodology of this long-term research opened up such questions as 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.

In this event she will be joined by Aigerim Kapar, curator, founder of the Artcom platform and one of the participants of the project As you go… research inquiry.

Bio’s

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 2024-2027). In 2025 she also curated an exhibition and research on Artists Books as Medium in China presented by ASE Foundation, Shanghai. Ciric is curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Serbia at 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 presenting the Walking with Water Solo exhibition of Vladimir Nikolic. 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).

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 holds PhD in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne.