The exhibition »Outside of what I can see, framed within my window« borrows its title from the sprawling, language-bending novel by Alexander Hamon »The World and All That It Holds« (2023) that takes the reader on a hundred years long journey across time and continents, starting from Sarajevo and Vienna and ending in Shanghai, exploring topics of love, friendship, solidarity, war, migration and enduring hope. It presents four women artists whose practices explore notions of belonging and diasporic European experience: Alma Bektaš (b. 1992 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives in Vienna), Lana Čmajčanin (b. in 1983 in Sarajevo, lives in Vienna), Mila Panić (b. 1991 in Brčko, lives in Berlin), and Selma Selman (b. 1991 in Bihać, lives in Amsterdam and New York).

The focus on diasporic experience addresses both the role of the West in the Yugoslav Wars—whose aftermath shaped the artists’ formative years—and broader historical and contemporary geopolitical entanglements. Bosnia and Herzegovina, once the only formal colony of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today stands as a European borderland shaped by migration, belonging, and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The exhibition project was developed by Nataša Ilić and Ivet Ćurlin (WHW) with the students of their two-year program.

The artists engage critically, at times confrontationally, with diasporic experience, revealing intertwined and unequal histories that shape the present. The exhibition challenges national narratives and examines how history is shaped, erased, or reinterpreted, foregrounding relationality as a way to imagine new forms of shared responsibility and connection.

The full programme and further information are available on the website of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

We warmly invite you to the exhibition opening on Friday, 29 May 2026, at 7 pm.

Admission is free – no registration required.

The two-year teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, initiated by the Kontakt Collection and supported by the ERSTE Foundation, promotes educational programs which facilitate knowledge about the theory and practice of art from former Eastern Europe.

Header image: Selma Selman, You Have No Idea, Belgrade, 2016. Photo: Maria Piroski