Transcultural curating is an approach to exhibition-making that takes migration, displacement, and multiple cultural affiliations as its starting point. Rather than organising art along national or ethnic lines, it asks how movement between cultures shapes the way artists see themselves, their work, and the world.

The term moves beyond multiculturalism — which tends to place cultures side by side — to examine what happens at the points of contact: how identities shift, how belonging becomes complicated, how an artist formed between two or more cultural contexts produces work that cannot be fully explained by either.

Why it matters in contemporary art

A growing number of artists today live and work across national borders. Their practice is informed not by a single cultural tradition but by the friction and exchange between several. Transcultural curating takes this seriously as a curatorial methodology — not as a theme imposed on artists from outside, but as a framework grounded in their actual conditions of production.

This means looking at questions of subjectivity and national belonging not as fixed categories but as processes: ongoing, contested, and shaped by specific histories of migration.

How Tijana Mišković applies it

Tijana Mišković has developed her transcultural curatorial practice across institutions in Denmark, Croatia, Cuba, South Africa, and beyond. Her PhD research at the University of Copenhagen examined how artists from the former Yugoslavia who left after the 1990s negotiate cultural identity and national belonging in their work.

This research grounds her curatorial decisions — in how she selects artists, frames exhibitions, and builds programmes that cross institutional and national borders without flattening the specificity of each artist’s position.

Her work at SMK, the Venice Biennale, Manifesta 8, and the Liverpool Biennial reflects this approach in practice.

Work with Tijana

For institutions and organisations interested in developing programmes around transcultural perspectives in contemporary art, contact Tijana at:
mail@tijanamiskovic.com.