A decade ago I wrote a text titled How to Put Ourselves between the Closing Door and Its Frame? about how to put one’s leg in the metaphorically closing door: about curatorial work that keeps open the narrowing angles of space in which culture can unfold freely. Today the door itself has disappeared. We are faced with high walls. Dissent is labelled terrorism, and state terror is legitimised. This talk is devoted to my curatorial research into practices that drill holes through walls, opening channels and currents through which culture can pass within closed systems. I will speak about how artists open channels for non-property, non-extractivist relations, protocols, and usership amidst blackout.

* Zasha Colah, “How to Put Ourselves between the Closing Door and Its Frame?”, in Paul O’Neill, Mick Wilson, and Lucy Steeds, eds, The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice?, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2016. This text was based on a public lecture at Städelschule, given at the invitation of Stefanie Heraeus and Nikolaus Hirsch during my DAAD fellowship in 2014.

Zasha Colah is a curator and artistic co-director of kunstverein Ar/Ge Kunst in Bozen-Bolzano (since 2023). Each exhibition there forms a working group of practitioners thinking together through pressing political, legal, and artistic questions. She curated the 13th Berlin Biennale (2025), the 2nd Yinchuan Biennale (as part of the curatorial team led by Marco Scotini, 2018), and the 3rd Pune Biennale (with Luca Cerizza, 2017). Colah was one of the founding members of Clark House Initiative in Mumbai (2010–2022), an art space and curatorial and artists’ collective. Since 2018, she has taught comparative curatorial studies at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. She is currently a visiting fellow at Städelschule in Frankfurt (2025–2026), where she teaches a course on processual and performative sculpture and its significance for contemporary exhibition forms.

Date: June 3 at 7:00 pm. Address: 59 Masanchi Street, Tselinny, Atelier educational space on the second floor of the center. Free admission, no registration required. The artist talk will be held in English.