Non-Aligned Feminist Friendships: Bulletin launch and conversation

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Non-Aligned Feminist Friendships is a collective exploring feminist strategies that link political imagination with art. Rooted in shared experiences, ongoing correspondence, and both private and public gatherings, they reinterpret Cold War non-alignment through a feminist lens. They examine how to articulate solidarity, peace, and freedom in today’s public spaces and art worlds, especially in the face of the suppression of autonomy in art, academia, and activism amid ongoing geopolitical struggles.

The project resists cancellation, intimidation, and silence linked to rising fascism and structural violence, while avoiding imposed divisions or simple choices. Following the group’s first gathering, the Bulletin will chart ongoing feminist strategies, embracing differences and uncertainties and prioritizing togetherness that is relational, evolving, and not dependent on agreement or unity.

Contributors to the Bulletin: Margareta Kern, Katia Krupennikova, Jelena Petrović, Armina Pilav, Nour Shantout, Tereza Stejskalová, and Bita Razavi

Armina Pilav is an architect, artist, independent researcher, and herbalist based on the island of Brač in Croatia. In 2016 she received the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for her research project Un-war Space, developed at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where she also taught in the Department of Architecture between 2016 and 2019. She was appointed a researcher and lecturer at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield from 2019 to 2022, where she taught the program Landscape, Art, and Politics. Pilav cultivates experimental spaces using transmedia forms. Through collective thinking, natural habitats and wild food, psycho-spatiality, radical observations, and feminist theory she exposes ecologies of war and the toxic transformation of architectures, rivers, lands, and interspecies society. She is the founder of the Un-war Space Lab, the Toxic Lands noncuratorial program, and the Divja plant sanctuary, which focuses on plant pedagogy and healing landscapes while coexisting with the Brač island ecosystem.

Jelena Petrović is an independent researcher, contemporary art theorist, and curator working at the intersection of art theory, feminist epistemologies, and the geopolitics/geopoetics of art. She introduces art geographies as a way of thinking about the relations between art, space, and political imaginaries within post-Yugoslav, nonaligned, and Mediterranean contexts, understood as overlapping geopolitical zones of resistance and discomfort. Her work unfolds through research, writing, collaborations, and curatorial projects. She is a cofounder and member of the feminist curatorial collective Red Min(e)d (since 2011) and the initiative Non-Aligned Feminist Friendships (since 2024). From 2008 to 2014 she was also a member of the art-theoretical group Grupa Spomenik. Her previous affiliations include the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, IZK Graz, CEU Vienna, IAS CEU Budapest, the Academy of Fine Arts and Design Ljubljana, and ISH Ljubljana, among others.

Katia Krupennikova (*1982, Moscow, Russia) is a curator, educator, and researcher based in Amsterdam. She currently works as a curator at Stichting Landfall and Kunstwerk Kolderveen and as a lecturer of Experimental Curatorial Studies in the MA Fine Art program at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht.

A graduate of the de Appel Curatorial Programme (2011–2012) and a former fellow at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (2019–2020), Krupennikova is a curator of the 2026 graduation show of TXT (the textile department) at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the guest editor of the 9th issue of Errant Journal, titled Companions (2026). Her most recent exhibitions include Politics of Rotation (a solo show of Polina Kanis at PAKT) and Remembering Otherwise (a solo show of belit sağ at Framer Framed and Gemeente Amsterdam Oost). Her past independent work includes projects with institutions in the Netherlands (de Appel, A Tale of A Tub, Oude Kerk, Nest Ruimte, Framer Framed) and abroad (Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Bergen Assembly, Ujazdowski Castle CCA, WKV Stuttgart, among others).

Krupennikova is a contributor to Metropolis M and a founding member of the collectives Oo(y)ster Mums and Non-Aligned Feminist Friendships (both 2024). She serves on the editorial board of Errant Journal and has acted as a guest lecturer and an external expert at ArtEZ (BEAR and Corpo-real) and St. Joost art academies and as a jury member, for instance, at apexart (2024–2025) and Rietveld Review (2022).

Tereza Stejskalová is a curator and researcher based in Prague, Czech Republic. She is the director of tranzit.cz and a cofounder of the Biennale Matter of Art. Between 2018 and 2022 she worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In 2017 she initiated the Feminist Art Institution, a coalition of cultural institutions in the Czech Republic and Slovakia united by a code of practice. She has collaborated on many exhibitions and projects all around Europe. She publishes texts in academic and non-academic journals and is an editor of several publications.