TransArts - Tia Čiček & Maximilian Lehner

The lecture will include an overview and explanation into how we (bad curating inc.) and individually (Tia Čiček and Maximilian Lehner) curate, converse, support, work/play by ourselves and with others. We will present topics, environments, frameworks that interest us or keep us up at night; what problems we face as institution programmers or freelancers while presenting our individual practices. We will address challenging conventional ways of working in the arts by prioritizing process over output, interrogating the circumstances, tasks, and relationships inherent in exhibition-making (Čiček) And we will introduce a curatorial approach and projects departing from the questions of how weak and vulnerable you can show yourself in exercising your curatorial tasks, and how to include insecurities, unfinished artistic research, and things we lack in, or desire and want to achieve (Lehner).

Tia Čiček holds a Master's degree in Art History and has curated exhibitions examining and experimenting with alternative processes and collaborations that interrogate the circumstances, tasks and relationships in contemporary arts. Due to their interest in curatorial methodologies and knowledge exchange, they attended the Thinking With Works of Art course under the mentorship of Ruth Noack and Grace Samboh at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts Salzburg. In 2020, they completed the World of Art School for Curatorial Practice and Critical Writing (SCCALjubljana).
Since May 2021, they have been part of the international fluid curatorial collective bad curating inc. Together with philosopher, theorist and curator Maximilian Lehner, they run the workshops Work, Curator, Work!, where a space is created for the equal sharing of knowledge and experiences in the field of contemporary art and personal hardships. Since January 2020, they have been the artistic director of Škuc Gallery, and from July 2022, with Lara Plavčak and Urška Aplinc, they run the World of Art School. In May and June 2024, they will take part of MQ AIR in Vienna, with the support of ERSTE Foundation. They are a part of the curatorial conversation platform bad curating inc.

Maximilian Lehner is a curator, critic and art historian emphasizing horizontal work structures and conceiving art and curating as epistemological forms to understand critical temporalities and the non-normative. For Kunstmuseum Moritzburg (Halle/Saale), he is currently preparing the public program for Planetary Peasants in 2025. He is part of the artist collective Funduk in Rome, the curatorial conversation platform bad curating inc., and Anomalies, an experimental curatorial research platform by Kurziv and kulturpunkt.hr in Zagreb in 2023-24. He was associate curator for the 70th anniversary festival at International Summer Academy of Fine Arts Salzburg in 2023, and co-founder of The Real Office, a Stuttgart-based agency for concepts, funding, PR, and project management for independent artists. Maximilian was teaching at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Media at KU Linz 2016-22. They curated exhibitions, among others, for Salzburger Kunstverein, aqb (Budapest), Škuc Gallery (Ljubljana), Nova BAZA (Zagreb), ElectroPutere (Bucharest), as well as with The Real Office in public space, shop and office vacancies. Maximilian’s writing is published in Parnass, Artforum, BLOK, Kajet, RevistaArta and he was Critic-in-Residence at Igor Zabel Association in 2022. They studied art theory and philosophy in Paris, Stuttgart, and Linz and at CuratorLab at Konstfack Stockholm.