4EVER CONNECTED by Anastasija Pavić

A site-specific performance within a corporate setting, 4EVER CONNECTED features a digital anime girl assistant, a hyper-designed archetype drawn from the aesthetics of user-facing AI and platform-based labor. Rather than enacting artificial intelligence, the piece collapses the boundary between self and simulation, blurring the line between human and technological subjectivity. The performance dissolves interiority into surface, with the assistant functioning simultaneously as narrator and object, subject and interface. With echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Baudrillard’s logic of the simulacrum, 4EVER CONNECTED suspends the viewer into a space of ontological ambiguity and interpretive uncertainty.

Anastasija Pavić is a multimedia artist based in Belgrade. She holds a degree in New Media Art from the University of Belgrade. Her practice explores post-cyber feminism, consumerism, interpersonal dynamics, and technology’s impact on identity. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, including four solo shows and online exhibitions with The Wrong Biennale and Ars Electronica, working across performance, video, photography, writing, and art direction.

📸 WBI E Meunier at Performissima Festival

Control Out of Control by Tijana Petrović and collaborators

Borders are not fixed. They shift, transform, and migrate. Depending on the accident of birth, one may see them as dangerous, invisible, or simply part of daily life. In the Western Balkans — often labeled a speculative borderland between East and West — borders have been drawn and redrawn in pursuit of national utopias, until they formed one vast, bloated border, a world of its own. We are all border subjects now, each in service of multiple utopias, each set on a path where our birthright is to perform as border patrol officers. In such a land, technology becomes obsolete, transparency loses meaning and returning to oral traditions seems the only way forward. In this ever-present borderscape, negotiating social imaginaries has become a ritual. Control Out of Control is a performance by a group of borderland residents, developing border guard personas and forming an agency to (re)create documents and scenarios. Members include Tijana Petrović, Katarina Čvorović, Ana Stojković and Ivanja Todorović, who will perform their first rehearsal of (b)ordering at IMPORT/EXPORT Belgrade. The agency may grow. As Rosello and Wolfe remind us: the border was always an aesthetic construct.

Tijana Petrović (b. 1997, Belarus) is a Serbian artist and researcher. Her work explores themes of borders, identity, labor and storytelling, particularly in the context of migration and diaspora. She usually works as an artist and waitress, but sometimes speculates on different scenarios. In this one, she is a self-recruited border patrol agent alongside Ana Stojković, Katarina Čvorović, and Ivanja Todorović.

📸 Tijana Petrović

Dear Lucy by Rilaben and Tina Salvadori Paz

Having discovered that both their family histories were marked by relatives who fought in Ethiopia as part of the colonial army, Rilaben and Tina Salvadori Paz created a performative installation drawing from Rilaben’s family archive. The piece focuses on letters written by Rilaben’s grandfather Don Peppe, who in 1935 joined fascist troops as a doctor in Ethiopia and remained there even after the war. These letters, addressed to his sister Lucia, converge with another figure bearing the same name: Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s. Known in Amharic as Dinqinesh (“you are wonderful”), Lucy remains a potent symbol in Ethiopia and worldwide. Layering voice, image, and text, Dear Lucy constructs a scenic device that activates echoes between empire, intimacy and fossil memory.

Enrico L’Abbate (aka Rilaben) is a multidisciplinary artist working with body, movement, space and voice. Valentina Lapolla (aka Tina Salvadori Paz) is a multimedia artist working across video, photography, and installation. Longtime collaborators, they develop site-specific works at the intersection of performance, visual arts and archival exploration.

📸 Johannes Puch

Autonomous Agent by Alma Gačanin

Autonomous Agent unfolds as a choreography of voice and silence. Alma Gačanin oscillates between two archetypal personas: the Service Worker and the Remembering Self. Audience bodies are positioned as “clients” within a corporate-sterile staging, then gradually drawn into mirroring gestures through imperative dialogue, exposing how capitalist systems train us to perform compliance even as we narrate our own unraveling. The work explores the mechanized emotional labor of client-care and the vulnerable interiority of a woman tracing her metamorphosis from childhood to societal womanhood. It constructs a tension between extracted productivity, drawn from Gačanin’s service-industry logs and intimate becoming, archived in personal diaries and interwoven with fragments from Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost.

Alma Gačanin is a visual artist, poet and feminist based in Sarajevo. She works across drawing, performance, photography and sculpture. In 2024, she received the Artist Changemaker Award from the Global Fund for Women. Winner of the 2022 ZVONO Art Award, she holds a Master’s in Fine Arts Education from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. She is a member of the CRVENA Association and her poetry is published across regional magazines and platforms.

📸 Luka Pešun

Festival by Darius Bogdanowicz

Set around the Moria detention camp on the island of Sappho (Lesbos), Festival follows a performance festival bringing together young artists in residence, migrants arriving from every corner of the world, and Sapphians of all ages. In this charged landscape, research artist Serena Siniarska confronts her own ghosts: her encounter with Rose, a young Nigerian woman newly arrived in Moria, forces her to question the ethics and value of her work, as well as her position as a Westerner within a globalized world. Expanding from the author's novel into performative space, Festival weaves literature, live reading and documentary photography by close collaborator Marco Ambrosini. The work reflects on the violences of so-called Fortress Europe and the inhuman politics affecting people on the move.

Author and performer Darius Bogdanowicz is based in Brussels. He works across literature, expanded publishing, and performance, with a particular focus on transdisciplinary formats and experimental writing. His recent works explore the intersections between migration, political imagination and the role of speculative fiction in shaping contemporary subjectivities.

📸 Marco Ambrosini

ACTA DISTANTIAE by Aleksander Zain

ACTA DISTANTIAE is a journal of a road traveled mostly by foot, from Venice to Livorno in 2023, on the occasion of IMPORT/EXPORT Livorno. Walking is a recurring element in Zain’s work, used here as a method of endurance and reflection to process personal experiences of mental health, anger and questions of displacement and belonging. Presented as a performance-installation during IMPORT/EXPORT Belgrade, the piece explores the documentation of performance art, a key concern of the platform. Rather than placing the artist’s body at the center, the work focuses on spatial performativity and audience interaction. Visitors engage with the space through clear instructions and an immersive audio-visual environment, activating the installation as a durational and processual experience.

Aleksander Zain is an artist with two very differentiated practices — he works as a dancer/choreographer and as a new media visual artist in the domain of video and long durational performance art. The main postulate of the big part of his practice is that the human body is much stronger than we were taught.

📸 Aleksander Zain

Am I Talking to a Wall? by Dragana Žarevac

Conceived after participating in the student protests in Serbia during the winter of 2024/25, Am I Talking to a Wall? reflects on an incident where Dragana Žarevac witnessed an angry driver attack a peaceful student blockade. Facing the man’s fury with calm and silent resolve, the students embodied a collective belief in truth and justice over selfishness and greed. For Žarevac, the entire protest movement felt like talking to a wall: no message could get through to the government. Reproducing the scene in the gallery, she addresses the wall in multiple languages, positioning her body against an immovable obstacle in a performative ritual drawing on ancestral gestures of resistance.

Dragana Žarevac is a media artist based in Belgrade, working across video, drawing, photography and performance. She exhibits internationally and has received grants from the French and Serbian Ministries of Culture, the City of Paris, French Ministry of Education, Open Society Fund, Goethe-Institut, Pro Helvetia, Roberto Cimetta Fund and the Stability Pact for Southeast Europe. Her awards include a Production Award at ZKM, the Golden Sphinx at Video Medeya and the Nadežda Petrović Award. Žarevac has held residencies at ZKM, CICV, Île Mouvante (Corsica) and several art residencies in Serbia.

📸 Vladan Obradović

Eclissi Urbane/Urban Eclipses by Maria Novella Tattanelli

in collaboration with Laura Sgherri

Created by Maria Novella Tattanelli in collaboration with visual artist Laura Sgherri, Eclissi Urbane / Urban Eclipses explores the fragile and transformative relationship between human presence and the environment. Performed in two acts — Act I on the white beaches of Vada, Act II at Flutgraben on the occasion of IMPORT/EXPORT Berlin 2024 — the piece layers video, sound and photography to create an immersive space where performance documentation becomes a living organism: shifting, fading and reappearing. Urban Eclipses invites viewers to witness how ephemeral traces can be reactivated, questioning how beauty, time and transformation are perceived and archived, while embracing the fluid memory of performative acts.

Maria Novella Tattanelli is an Italian dancer and performance artist working across movement, installation and curatorial practice. She has collaborated with numerous international artists, including Marina Abramović, and now co-curates and coordinates IMPORT/EXPORT.

Laura Sgherri is a photographer and visual artist exploring the connection between body and environment through intimate, meditative imagery. Together, they create site-specific works merging performance and visual art.

📸 Laura Sgherri

There and Back by Tiina Lehtimäki

Tiina Lehtimäki moves a found sofa from Location A to B — and back again. From time to time, she invites passersby to share the weight, to sit, to rest, to chat, or simply to be. Conversations are unscripted. The journey unfolds at its own pace, open to detours and delays with each person who joins.  As the sofa slowly travels toward its destination, it is the journey itself which becomes the performance.

Tiina Lehtimäki, who was born and raised in the Finnish countryside, is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in dance, theater, and painting. She creates performances in non-traditional spaces, both indoors and outdoors, exploring architecture, social dynamics and audience interaction. Tiina has worked as a freelance performer in several international dance productions across Europe and in the retrospective exhibition The Cleaner by Marina Abramović (2017–2020).

📸 Oriane Paras

Amerkána by Sharon Estacio

Amerkána (working title) is an interactive setting where performer and visitors practice peaceful acts of revolution through word games. The piece offers a space for respite, contemplation, conversation and deliberation, as participants contribute to an ever-growing constellation of terms, phrases, and discourse. Estacio closes the performance by resetting the empty space, underscoring the tension of a transitory condition. The work stands as a testament to the fragility of what a community can lose: undocumented narratives, cancelled perspectives, entire conversations erased, vocabularies exterminated. Amerkána, a Filipino word of Kapampángan origin, signifies an American woman, but is also used to describe (male) formal attire. Its etymology, from the Spanish americana, dates back to the Spanish colonization of the Philippines from the 1500s to the late 1800s.

Sharon Estacio (she/her) is a second generation Filipino American dance artist, performer, educator and activist. Through movement-based performance, video, sound and installation she elaborates her transnational and transcultural experience between America, Italy and the Philippines.

📸 Sharon Estacio