KRAK – Center for Contemporary Culture
The KRAK Center for Contemporary Culture in Bihać is an independent multifunctional space established by the Revizor Foundation which aims to work and produce new social practices. The main focus of KRAK is visual arts, performance, architecture, urbanism and design. What KRAK further focuses on are social engagement and ecology as ways of sustainable collaboration leading to urban and social regeneration.
The name KRAK originated as an abbreviation of “Kombiteks Workers’ Club” (Bosnian: Klub radnika Kombiteksa), indicating the importance of preserving the local industrial heritage and culture of labor of self-governing Yugoslav socialism. With its headquarters in the industrial zone of the former textile factory Kombiteks, the area in and around KRAK has been the scene of various discursive-artistic interventions in the last few years, which gave rise to the idea of launching an active and propulsive space of action.
The idea and motive for starting KRAK came from the specific political, social and cultural circumstances of the environment in which it operates. The main determinants of this environment are the neglected industrial past, ethno-national conflict, post-war post-traumatic experience, poverty and depopulation. KRAK is a direct response to the ongoing crisis and the current social environment, which wants to believe that culture, science and art can and should be the drivers of social change. As such, KRAK wants to position itself as a platform of alternative learning, collaboration and coexistence with a focus on contemporary art strategies and inventive protocols in the field of contemporary culture.