Irena Haiduk
Irena Haiduk directs Yugoexport, a blind and non-aligned oral corporation whose founding logic is equivalence, loyalty, and familial solidarity between people and things. Initiated as a copy of the former Yugoslav apparel and weapons manufacturer Jugoeksport, Yugoexport is formally incorporated in the United States (where corporations are people), launched in Paris and headquartered in New York. Their maxim, How To Surround Your Self With Things In The Right Way, powers the production of images, books, apparel, orations, films, scenographies, and variable spaces, all designed to nourish the organ of imagination. Irena Haiduk often collaborates with institutions like the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Istanbul Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, documenta 14, Swiss Institute, Sternberg Press, Art Basel, Acne Studios, to name a few.
Haiduk’s work is invested in relationships between aesthetics and economy, image ecology and the way that economic infrastructures leave clear aesthetic marks. She believes that to work in an aesthetic field rooted in making desires, to make art today, is to share the responsibility for what aesthetic economies maintain. Desires, many of them powered by art, brought us here. As our planet becomes impossible to physically inhabit, it is urgent to ask again, from many directions and on every level: how can we desire differently?
There are many ways to start. Art provides means to construct a public place, a studio for study, testing and learning where vital conversations find many forms. Since 2018, Irena Haiduk's studium has been hosted, in part, by the Department of Art History at Barnard College where Haiduk is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice. Current lines of study and practice are named Buoyancy, Loving, and The Third Way.