Marko Stamenkovic

 

Marko Stamenkovic (1977) was born in Vranje (Serbia) and has been living over the last five years in various cities across the Balkan Peninsula, most notably in Albania and Croatia. As an art historian with a strong interest in the decolonial politics of race, ethnicity, and sexuality, he has been working primarily in the field of contemporary visual arts as a curator, critic, writer and lecturer focused on the intersection of visual thinking and social theories, political philosophies, and cultural practices of the marginalized and the oppressed. In addition to his more conventional approaches to exhibition making, public speaking and textual production, he has also been experimenting with performative and pseudo-theatrical forms of expression to convey ideas proper to his research: they are closer to  playwriting, performing "closet" dramas and tableau vivant (living picture) appearances, realized mainly through one-to-one collaborations involving photographers or professionals outside of the art world - such as a swimmer and beach lifeguard in his most recent closet play From the Heights of Light, presented in October 2020 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka. 

       His project for MeetFactory, based on his earlier public appearances in a white male skirt (or "fustanella", a costume proper to anti-colonial and folklore traditions of the region of Gjirokastra in southern Albania), is meant to be done in a similar vein: this time together with his Prague-based counterpart Piotr Sikora (aka Miss Summer), in a sci-fi scenario that bares naked an astonishing fact about the disappearance of women, all of a sudden, from the planet Earth - and the overall crisis of masculinity ensuing thereafter...

 

Education:

 

Marko Stamenkovic holds a PhD in Philosophy from Ghent University in Belgium where, between 2011 and 2014, he worked on questions of sacrifice, self-sacrifice in protest, and suicide to explore the in-visible relationship between human mortality and politico-economic powers on the darker side of democracy. His dissertation (Suicide Cultures: Theories and Practices of Radical Withdrawal), supported by the European Commission's Basileus Scholarship, offered nonorthodox insights into thanatopolitical philosophy as a decolonial epistemic option from a perspective of the global South.

Prior to this, he earned his BA degree in Art History with a thesisThe Gaze Theory and Image Analysis (2003) and his MA degree in Cultural Management with a thesis The Status of Curatorial Practices in Post-socialist Conditions(2005) from the University of Belgrade. His early internship positions include one in New York (Artists Space Gallery, 2001) and another in Venice (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2004). He is a member of AICA - Croatia and IKT. 

 

Work:

 

Writing, lecturing and exhibition making are at the core of Marko's work. His international guest-lectures include, among others, universities and art venues in Podgorica, Skopje, Sofia, Tirana, Cetinje, Tallinn, Gent, Vienna, Gothenburg, Pretoria, Tehran, Isfahan, Istanbul, Mexico City, Oslo, Alger, Dublin, Brno, Yerevan, Recife, and Alexandria. In February 2019, he participated in an international colloquium at the Parsons School of Art and Design in New York, as part of the Annual Conference of Art Historians organized by the CAA - College Art Association under the auspices of the Getty Foundation. His most recent exhibition projects include:Brigita Antoni – The Moon is Wet and Wild (Montenegro, 2019), A Body Burning (Croatia, 2019), Fatlum Doci – Signs (Serbia & Croatia, 2019); Sead Kazanxhiu – Nests (Albania, 2018); Egon Van Herreweghe – Heidi’s Delight (Belgium, 2017), To Die Out Laughing (Bulgaria, 2017), All Joy Wants Eternity (Albania, 2017), and Vlasta Delimar – Put Your Faith in Women (Austria, 2016). In 2018 he worked in Albania as an Adjunct Lecturer in Art History at the University of New York in Tirana and as an associate curator of ZETA Contemporary Art Center. Most recently, Marko has been engaged as a remote Adjunct Lecturer in Art History and Contemporary Image Theories at the Faculty of Visual Studies in Montenegro, and is also working towards an upcoming collaboration with the Croatian Association of Visual Artists in Dubrovnik.