geobalkans

Queer Zagreb is a year-round manifestation that, through various artistic areas, promotes the aesthetic and social norms of a transitional society, combining identity activism with artistic expression that opposes dominant practices. The program was developed in 2013 after 10 years of active activity of the Queer Zagreb festival in the field of visibility and strengthening of artistic practices and authors whose work focuses on the themes of the LGBTIQ community and queer culture in a broader sense. Queer Zagreb deservedly remains one of the most significant and innovative festival programs of the independent scene in the wider local context.

Skopje Pride Weekend is a festival for queer arts, culture and theory, whose goal is creating space for presentation and promotion of non-normative forms of world-making, that is to say relations, affects, identity positions, bodily styles and sensibilities that have been marked, by the heteronormative, nationalistic and neoliberal capitalist context, as queer, eccentric failures. The program’s focus of the Skopje Pride Weekend is set on cultural and arts performing practices, as well as gender, sexuality and queer theory’s knowledge productions and critique. In the course of previous years we have hosted exhibitions, performances, lectures, seminars by Vaginal Davis and Boryana Rossa, Cassils, Hélène Barriere and Victor Marzouk, Dominic Johnson, Aérea Negrot, Ephemeral Confessions, Del LaGrace Volcano, David Hoyle and the Lipsinkers, Ivo Dimchev, Travis Alabanza, Ron Athey, boychild, Rachael Young, David M. Halperin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry, Karin Michalski, Federica Dauri and Hermes Pittakos, Keijaun Thomas, STEAM ROOM, Lauren Berlant, FRANKO B, Nao Bustamante and Marcus Kuiland Nazario, SVETLOST, SPIT! Manifesto collective, Jelisaveta Blagojevic, Julie Tolentino and Stosh Fila, Matthieu Hocquemiller, Julischka Stengele, Wolfgang Tillmans etc.

The annual International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women takes place at the beginning of October. Inviting between forty and sixty women artists and theorists each years, it attracts several thousand visitors from all ages, professions and interests. Since its institution, the Festival has welcomed over seven hundred female and male artists, collectives, groups, curators, theorists and activists from all over the world, ranging from the emerging to the pre-eminent. In establishing liaisons with many different institutional and alternative venues in the city of Ljubljana, Slovenia and abroad, the Festival enjoys wide media exposure. Slovenia’s premier national cultural centre, Cankarjev Dom, has been its main co-producer. As a transdisciplinary festival, it has a rather experimental profile, welcoming artists who experiment with, blur, and even cross, the boundaries of genres.