Institutional Resilience: Liberated Students’ Art Center and the Subversive Potential of Art in Serbia
Invitation
This public talk explores how art and cultural institutions operate in moments of social and political rupture, focusing on the Liberated Student Cultural Centre (SKC) in Belgrade.
🗓 11 March 2026, 18:00📍Hollands College,Pater Damiaanplein 9, 3000 Leuven. Register here.
After the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024, which killed 16 people, Serbia saw the emergence of a powerful nationwide protest movement led by students.
The tragedy became a symbol of systemic corruption and the increasingly authoritarian rule associated with President Aleksandar Vučić’s political establishment. The country was soon marked by near-daily protests, university blockades, and the creation of new forms of civic self‑organisation. A particularly striking response arose from the cultural field, which, since the turbulent transitions of the 1990s, has been shaped by privatisation, institutional neglect, lack of state support, and the gradual hibernation of once-vital cultural spaces that defined the avant-gardeof the 1970s. One such space is the Student Cultural Centre (SKC), historically a key site of experimental artistic production. Over time, SKC became emblematic both of the degradation of contemporary cultural institutions and of the state’s withdrawal from supporting young artists. In February 2025, students took over the long-dormant SKC, and the action was described alternately as an “occupation”, “blockade”, or “liberation”, rapidly transforming the space into a vibrant, self-organised cultural and political platform. Through exhibitions, assemblies, discussions, film screenings, and performances, the Liberated SKC became a living laboratory for collective practice, solidarity, and democratic imagination. Its activities were ultimately halted by a police raid in July 2025, a moment that raised urgent questions about the limits of institutional autonomy, cultural resistance, and political dissent, and the question of a potential role art can have in enacting resistance instead of representing it became pressing.
The discussion brings together Milica Pekić (art historian and curator, Belgrade), Wouter Hillaert (journalist, Belgium), Ana Stojković and Ivanja Todorović (participants in the Liberated SKC initiative), and is moderated by Tijana Petrović (artist and cultural worker based in Belgium). They reflect on the legacy of SKC and the broader role of culture in rehearsing alternative democratic futures, in Serbia and across Europe.
This talk is part of Greetings from Serbia, a series of discussions taking place on 11–12 March through podcasts and a movie night, connecting stories of civic struggle, creativity, and resistance emerging in Serbia since the 2024 student-led anti‑regime movements. The series is supported by the Forum on Central and Eastern Europe, Kunsthal Gent, RITCS, and Palac Gore, an informal Serbian diaspora group based in Brussels.
Programme
18:00 — Opening by Tijana Petrović
The evening opens with a brief framing of the events unfolding in Serbia since November 2024, how a student-led movement grew into something much larger, and why cultural spaces so often become the first battleground when governments feel threatened.
18:10 — Conversation: Milica Pekić & Wouter Hillaert
Milica Pekić speaks from within the Serbian cultural field; Wouter Hillaert from the perspective of a Belgian journalist who witnessed the movement up close. Together they trace the fault lines between institutional culture and the independent scene, the ways governments instrumentalize the arts, and what happens when artists and cultural workers decide to resist. The conversation moves from the specific, the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, to the uncomfortably familiar: how different, really, is the situation elsewhere in Europe?
18:40 — Q&A with the audience The floor opens for questions and reflections.
19:00 — Break
19:15 — Experiences from Liberated SKC With Ana Stojković, Ivanja Todorović, Milica Pekić, Wouter Hillaert, and organizers Sanja Mitrović, Dragana Radanović, and Jana Vasiljević , moderated by Tijana Petrović.
Ana Stojković and Ivanja Todorović share what it was like from the inside: the buildup, the moment of entry, the months of activity that followed, and the night the police arrived. For some, it was a liberation. For pro-government media, it was something else entirely. This part of the evening traces the full arc, from first steps to what comes next.
19:45 — Q&A with the audience
20:00 — Closing & informal exchange
The conversation continues informally over drinks in town and carries over into the following evening in Ghent.