07/02/2025
FORART GRANT 2025
– Call for applications –
FORART Institute for Research within Contemporary Art gives grants to projects supporting academic and art critical research in contemporary art annually. The deadline for submitting an application for the 2025 FORART grant is April 15, 2025.
For more information, visit the link in our bio or contact us at [email protected].
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We were pleased to see the 2023 FORART Grant recipients, Dr. Noemi Smolik and MgA. Adam Vačkář, recently serve as head curators of the 14th Fotograf Festival in Prague.
Since 2016, they have led *Hope Recycling Station*, a platform connecting the Czech and international art scenes. Their work on the Fotograf Festival followed their organization of the symposium *Make Voices Be Heard* in December 2023, based on their FORART-funded research project, *Decolonization of Central and Eastern Europe*.
The four-part exhibition series *Make Voices Be Heard* during the Fotograf Festival in Prague presented a mosaic of artworks exploring themes of cultural identity and historical memory. Highlights included:
🔹 A reconstruction of events surrounding violent attacks on q***r activists in Tbilisi in 2013 by Soso Dumbadze (Georgia).
🔹 “Queer Archives Institute” by Karol Radziszewski (Poland), presenting q***r archives from Central and Eastern Europe.
🔹 “Theater of Life,” a five-channel projection by Meiro Koizumi (Japan), addressing cultural identity and personal narratives in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
🔹 “Love, Dad,” an award-winning film by Diana Cam Van Nguyen, exploring the clash between Vietnamese traditions and modern society.
"In recent years, the debate about the legacy of colonialism has been a dominant theme in contemporary art. However, there has been little participation from representatives of Central and Eastern European countries and Central Asia, despite their significant historical experiences with colonialism and racial discrimination." – Smolik and Vačkář.
📷 Installation views, Make Voices Be Heard, Fotograf Festival, Prague, 2024.
Photos by Jakub Tulinger and Jan Kolsky.
