Artist in Residence, Stockholm, 1 June–28 August 2026

Marko Aksentijević is based in Belgrade, and his practice unfolds at the intersection of urban politics, cultural production and community building. Creating spaces—physical, social and symbolic—where people gather, make things together and organize has been at the core of his work for over fifteen years. This has taken many forms, including co-founding the squat and social centre Inex Film and the Street Gallery; organizing over a hundred editions of the spoken word festival Poetrying; and, through the Ministry of Space Collective, a Belgrade-based platform for democratic urban development he co-founded in 2011, engaging in local urban struggles, campaigns and advocacy on urban development, housing rights and spatial equality. Across these different registers, his work explores how cultural and community interventions can generate new forms of political space—not merely venues for expression, but sites of organizing, solidarity and collective imagination.

Photo: Luka Knežević Strika

Marko Aksentijević

During his IASPIS residency, Marko Aksentijević will use the time to reflect on his practice. Engaging with groups and individuals working at the intersection of art and urban politics in Stockholm, he will examine a question central to his broader work: what kinds of interventions—spatial, cultural, communal—are capable of generating a genuine sense of community and political space? Stockholm, with its distinct traditions of urban self-organization and cooperative models, offers a productive context in which to examine this from new angles and bring fresh perspectives back into his work.

Marko Aksentijević holds a Master of Political Science from the Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, and studied at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, New York (2005). Alongside his work with the Ministry of Space Collective, he has been active across a diverse spectrum of groups—from neighbourhood assemblies and campaign coalitions to housing movements and municipalist platforms, including Don’t Let Belgrade D(r)own, Who Builds the City, and Common Action for The Roof Over Our Heads. This work extends into collaboration with pan-European networks active in the fields of housing, urban commons and participatory grant-making. In recent years, his work with the Ministry of Space has been presented at the Prague Quadrennial, Prague (2023); the 60th October Salon, Belgrade (2024); and Living the City – About Cities, People and Stories, Berlin (2021), and published in, among others, Manual on Defending Space (Belgrade, 2021).

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