Issue 65 / July 2026
eds. Zoran Erić, Mischa Kuball, Dorothee Richter and Simone Voigt

if walls could tell – East-Central European Perspectives on Participation

The central focus of this issue is based on a proposition by Mischa Kuball that foregrounds the possible emergence of a new position of the artist as catalyst, and concurrently, the curator as mediator. This is a pertinent provocation within the contemporary art-world that is often saturated with celebrity culture and where art institutions tend toward landscapes of power and politics instead of contact zones and spaces for negotiation and exchange. As simple as it was, the idea of placing blank white walls in public spaces of different cities, symbolically referring to the concept of a gallery or museum’s white cube gives free access to the citizens to make their imprints on these walls and thus exercise their right to publicly comment on the issues that concern them.

Together, the contributions raise questions about the role of cultural institutions at the semi-periphery of Europe, the limits and possibilities of participatory art, and the capacity of shared public space to build or repair social bonds in societies marked by fragility, contestation, and ongoing civic unrest. The project unfolded across seven cities — Sarajevo, Bucharest, Skopje, Chișinău, Ljubljana, Kraljevica, and Čačak.