Supervisor: PhDr. Vít Havránek, Ph.D.

This research project redefines curating as a practice of worldbuilding by examining exhibitions as speculative worlds and their worldbuilding architectures. Building on recent theoretical perspectives regarding “fictioning,” the world-making power of art, and the conditions of the present as shaped by new technologies, ecological change and erosion of shared truth and meaning, the project follows a broader cultural and academic shift towards fiction and speculative approaches, and extends these concerns to exhibition-making.

Motivated by the shortcomings of institutional critique and presentism on the one hand, and the need to break through “capitalist realism” and the crisis of imagination on the other, this study employs the concept of “worldbuilding”—typically associated with speculative fiction and game design—as a lens to examine recent trends in contemporary art and reinterpret its primary medium: the exhibition. By reframing the exhibition as a site where alternative realities can be modeled, experienced, and cultivated, the project investigates the potential of exhibition-making to propose new ways of belonging to a shared world in a time when envisioning alternatives feels both urgent and impossible.

The project explores a shift from social critique to worldbuilding as a new form of transformative practice in contemporary art and curating, while critically engaging with centralised, top-down, and anthropocentric accounts of worldbuilding. In its final stage, it aims to develop a framework for speculative curatorial practice as “worldbuilding from a periphery,” informed by relational, embodied, and more-than-human perspectives.

MFA Tjaša Pogačar Podgornik,

Studio:

Dissertation Thesis: Worldbuilding from the Periphery: Fictional Approaches in Contemporary Art of Eastern Europe

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