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Aleksei Borisionok and Katalin Erdődi, curators of the upcoming Matter of Art Biennale in Prague (2024) will share work experiences and research interests in a seminar of accidental wisdom. Grafting two curatorial lines into one project, the curators will look at how historical struggles in rural and urban contexts resonate with the contemporary moment and enable us to think about more emancipatory possible futures.

Katalin Erdődi focuses on rural change as social change, taking an interest in rural realities that are often underrepresented in the contemporary public discourse and cultural production. Together with artists, she initiates research-driven, context-specific collaborations and invites people from very different walks of life to a process of collective creation that foregrounds diverse forms of knowledge and lived experience, thus fostering heterogenous and pluri-vocal rural counterpublics inspired by Nancy Fraser’s notion of subaltern counterpublics and Chantal Mouffe’s call for agonistic public spheres.

Through the changing landscape of work and leisure time, Aleksei Borisionok will focus on various legacies and futures of the workers’ movement—its fragmented narratives, unsettled heritage, historical strikes, and contemporary forms of labor unrest in post-socialist countries and beyond, asking how strikes have been represented throughout history and how the notion of the strike as a gesture of disruption and refusal could be represented at all.