THE UNBOUNDED NATURE OF A BORDER

ZONA SZTUKI AKTUALNEJ (CONTEMPORARY ART ZONE), opening: May 15, 2025, 5 p.m., exhibition open until June 1, 2025

OS17, opening: May 22, 2025, 7 p.m., exhibition open until June 1, 2025

ZONA LAB is more than a residency program – it is a living laboratory located at the intersection of contemporary art, research, and interdisciplinary education. Located in a border town in Central and Eastern Europe, it functions both as a place and a medium for critical engagement. Addressing issues of fluidity of identity, territory, and belonging, ZONA LAB supports experimental artistic practices that question dominant narratives and propose alternative counter-maps of resistance and radical imagination.

This year's residents—Laureta Hajrullahu, Alberto Lomas, Ayuna Shagdurova, and Natalia Vatsadze—respond to contemporary challenges through diverse artistic strategies. Their practices intersect in the areas of memory, intimacy, indigeneity, digital technologies, and bodily resistance. Drawing on different geopolitical contexts and artistic traditions, each resident develops a research-based practice rooted in experience and affect.

Laureta Hajrullahu (Serbia/Kosovo) navigates the porous boundaries between physical and virtual reality. Through multimedia installations, she explores intimacy, privacy, and gender in digital ecosystems, revealing the algorithmic architectures of control that shape—and surveil—human relations.

Alberto Lomas (Spain) analyzes the politics of technology through performance and audiovisual installations. His practice, rooted in self-organized initiatives, explores the connections between power structures and digital infrastructure, pointing to both their emancipatory potential and inherent violence.

Ayuna Shagdurova (Russia/Germany), a photographer and journalist of Buryat origin, resists cultural erasure through documentary, intimate narratives. Her lens restores visibility to Siberian cosmologies, rituals, and everyday life, offering a visual counterpoint to hegemonic histories.

Natalia Vatsadze (Georgia) places the body at the center of her artistic and activist practice. With ironic sharpness, she exposes the contradictions of Georgia's post-Soviet transformation, analyzing the tensions between progress, nationalism, and cultural evolution.

As a discursive platform, ZONA LAB supports long-term artistic research through collaboration with local communities, activists, and scholars. The six-month residency is not only a time for creative work, but also a process of immersion that fosters exchange, tension, and transformation—beyond institutional and disciplinary frameworks.

The exhibition THE UNBOUNDED NATURE OF A BORDER is not a conclusion or summary, but rather an open proposal: a space for speculation, dialogue, and transformation. Instead of answers, questions arise: how do we shape a sense of belonging in a world of constant shifts? What alternative futures can emerge from the borderline experiences we share? Through their engaged artistic practice, the ZONA LAB residents draw temporary maps of community, resistance, and radical imagination.

The exhibition will be presented in two parts: at the ZONA gallery, located at the Academy of Art in Szczecin, which has been transformed into an artists' studio and practice laboratory for the duration of the residency, and at the OS17 gallery – an artist-run space located in a tenement house, referring to the tradition of independent galleries from the 1960s and 1970s. Both locations will be adapted by the artists as site-specific projects, referring both to their individual research practices and to the local context of Szczecin – its history, urban layers, and geopolitical entanglements.

Curator: Agata Rogos / Weiss

Agata Rogos / Weiss is a designer, researcher, curator, and anthropologist specializing in border studies, migration, and urban anthropology. She holds the title of professor at the Academy of Art in Szczecin and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her PhD, completed at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, focused on collective memory and identity in Macedonia. She has taught and lectured internationally and runs Vernacular Forms, a curatorial and design practice exploring research projects, design, and art installations.

Project assistant: Waldemar Masicz

This project has been funded with support from the European Union. The views expressed in this document are in no way an expression of the official opinion of the European Union.

The exhibition “The Unbounded Nature of a Border” is part of the ZONA LAB residency program, which takes place within the CULTURE MOVES EUROPE initiative, funded by the European Commission and implemented by the Goethe-Institut. ZONA LAB provides a space for artists exploring the concept of borders in their various dimensions—geographical, cultural, and conceptual.