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.

BeFem – feminist cultural center is a Serbian feminist group established in March 2011 but actively working in the feminist field since mid 2009.
BeFem promotes ideas and politics of feminism and encourages young women to get involved and contribute in re/constructing reality. Main course of the BeFem is the BeFem festival of feminist culture and action. Festival is a continuation of what the feminist movement has been doing so far and at the same time it is opening new fields of action through dialogue and initiatives with feminists with different background. Every year BeFem is formed through cooperation between activists, theorists and musicians from Balkan region and Sweden.
Apart from the festival, BeFem organizes the course “Feminist Media Culture: Gender Production”, in cooperation with Center for Women’s Studies within the one-year undergraduate program of Women’s Studies.

The Platform arises from the need for a free and safe space where activist, intellectual, artistic and cultural production can take place, which will contribute to the visibility of various feminist practices and technologies of resistance. Regional women’s, feminist and queer festivals, media websites and initiatives belong to the continuity of feminist practices in the nEXt YU area, while at the same time they open up new fields of action and voice a new generation of feminists with different private and public histories. Members of the platform are collaborating in different projects, the main one in this period is WoW – Women on Women.

The Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje (ISSHS) is a nonprofit research organization in applied social and humanities studies focusing mainly on multi-issue policy studies. It holds the status of a scientific institution in the fields of social sciences and humanities accorded by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Macedonia (Decision nr. 30). It is also an accredited graduate school offering MA level programs in multi-issue policy studies, cultural studies and gender studies. The Institute holds an Erasmus+ charter of Higher Education Institutions in Europe. Its core activities consist in multi–issue policy studies and policy related advocacy and training, coupled with basic research in the social sciences and humanities.