Ground Floor America

What, How & for Whom (WHW) is a nonprofit group based in Zagreb. The collective consists of curators who have collaborated since 1999. Together they run the city owent Gallery Nova, of contemporary art in Zagreb, and in 2009 WHW curated the Istanbul Biennale. Ground Floor America reflects on the two years of curatorial research that the group did in preparation for the Istanbul Bienniale.

Ground Floor America draws its inspiration from the travel journal by the same name. The authors, Ilya Ilf (pseudonym for Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzilberg) and Yevgeny Petrov (pseudonym of Yevgeny Petrovich Kataev), wrote the book as documentation of a car trip across the United States that they took during the economic depression in the 1930s. The exhibition draws parallels from the financial crisis of the past to the crisis of today, and raises discussion on what is understood by culture.

Ground Floor America investigates processes and mechanisms in national codes and their influence on the perception of other cultures. The exhibiting artists' origins are from so-called "ghost regions" in the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and The Caucasus – regions that hold a marginalised position in the international art scene. WHW uses the art exhibition to create a cultural and political arena in which the artwork gives the visitor deeper insight into cultures that are rarely represented in the Western art world. As such WHW present the product of their curatorial research within the context of cultural translation – aiming to open the eyes of the viewer to different and new perspectives on the "other" and on the familiar and well known.

Ground Floor America
Kuratoren: WHW 

Künstler: Vyacheslav Akhunov, Jawad Al Malhi, Factory of Found Clothes , Inci Furni, Orkhan Huseynov, Tigran Khachatryan, Yuri Leiderman, Maha Maamoun, Vlado Martek, Darinka Pop-Mitic, Vahid Sharifian, Skart Group , Jinoos Taghizadeh, Guram Tsibakhashvili, Alexander Ugay, Elena Vorobyeva & Viktor Vorobyev