Potato Empowering Trajectories
Role: Curating and Production
Date: 4.10 — 7.12.2025
Location: P.E.T. Projects, Athens
Participating artists: Darko Aleksovski, Andrea Palášti, Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić, Sam Durant, Angelo Plessas, and Ana Prvački
The initial 2024–25 cycle of the mentorship program brought together three mentees—Darko Aleksovski, Andrea Palášti, and Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić—from non-EU Balkan countries with established artists Sam Durant, Angelo Plessas, and Ana Prvački as mentors. It culminated in an exhibition I curated, presenting work by all six participants and foregrounding a collectively shaped dialogue developed over the year, alongside experimentation and multiple approaches to a shared theme.
During the mentorship year, Serbia entered a period of national unrest following the November 2024 collapse of the Novi Sad railway station canopy, a tragedy that sparked mass student protests against systemic corruption. Amid escalating tensions, a public remark directed at striking academics—“Professors who do nothing but participate in blockades will get potatoes”—was intended as an insult, but quickly became an emblem of resilience and collective resistance. The potato resurfaced throughout our mentorship discussions as both a political symbol and a resonant art-historical reference: ordinary, grounded, and unexpectedly potent.
This became the conceptual core for the final exhibition, Potato Empowering Trajectories. The show placed the potato at its center as metaphor, material, and message—tracing trajectories of resistance, ecological awareness, and renewal. Across the contributions of mentors and mentees, the exhibition proposed the potato as connective tissue: a bridge between practices, a shared figure through which to reflect on present conditions, and a way to extend relationships beyond the Balkans. Like root systems beneath the soil, the project mapped the networks that sustain artistic life—entangled, adaptive, and generative.
Potato Empowering Trajectories, 2025, installation view. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis. Sam Durant, Proposal for Monument to Professors Who Do Nothing but Participate in Blockades, 2025, mix media installation. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis. Sam Durant, Proposal for Monument to Professors Who Do Nothing but Participate in Blockades (detail), 2025, mix media installation. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis.Potato Empowering Trajectories, 2025, installation view. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis. Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić, Potato Empowering Trajectories, 2025, installation view. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis. Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić, What Can a Potato Foretell Us About Ourselves? (detail), 2025, mix media, performative installation. Photo by Nefeli Papaioannou. Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić, What Can a Potato Foretell Us About Ourselves? (detail), 2025, mix media, performative installation. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis.Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić, What Can a Potato Foretell Us About Ourselves?, 2025, mix media installation. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis.Darko Aleksovski, A Tablescape Between Roots and Flowers (detail), 2025, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo by Nefeli Papaioannou. Darko Aleksovski, A Tablescape Between Roots and Flowers (detail), 2025, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis. Darko Aleksovski, A Tablescape Between Roots and Flowers (detail), 2025, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis. Angelo Plessas, Potato Earth Theory (P.E.T.): A Cosmology of Roots in Silence, 2025, installation view. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis.Angelo Plessas, Potato Earth Theory (P.E.T.): A Cosmology of Roots in Silence, 2025, quilt. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis.Andrea Palasti, The Shape of a Potato, 2025, installation view. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis.
Andrea Palasti, The Shape of a Potato (detail), 2025, school book. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis.Potato Empowering Trajectories, 2025, installation view. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis.
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