The presentation of the 2025 kültüř gemma! fellowships and scholarships unfolds not as a conclusion, but as a constellation: the outcome of six months shaped by mentorship, collective study, and embodied practices of listening.

What emerges here is not a series of isolated works, but a dynamic field of artistic positions. These practices move fluidly across memory, migration, refusal, and collective imagination. The artists gathered in this edition inhabit territories where the personal, the political, and the ancestral continuously intersect.

Many of the participating artists engage with sites where official histories fall silent. Their works speak from the margins, from lived experiences denied protection, recognition, or legitimacy by state and institutional frameworks. In these contexts, storytelling becomes an act of resistance, and the archives of collective experience extend beyond institutional walls, finding form in bodies, gestures, oral narratives, community rituals, and everyday acts of survival.

This exhibition proposes the archive not as a static repository, but as a living, contested terrain. Through artistic practice, participants trace the fragments of collective memory that persist despite erasure, and in doing so, articulate new visual languages and iconographies, aesthetic forms that reject colonial frameworks and arise instead from anti-colonial imagination.

Public and social movements are present here as genealogies of knowledge. These works echo the histories of collective organizing, protest, and disobedience recognizing them not merely as political strategies, but as embodied epistemologies that determine how communities move, gather, and envision liberation.

Within this horizon, dance and movement appear as technologies of freedom. The body becomes a vessel of transmission carrying memory, trauma, pleasure, and futurity. Movement is approached not simply as choreography, but as a methodology: a way of thinking, remembering, and generating knowledge otherwise.

kültüř gemma! Edition 2025–2026