Renea Behluli
area: Cultural Management, Contemporary Art Curatorship and Exhibition Research
Key Facts
nationality
Kosovoarea
Cultural Management, Contemporary Art Curatorship and Exhibition Researchresidence
Prishtinarecommending institution
BMWKMStime period
September 2025 - November 2025Renea Behluli is a cultural manager, curator, and researcher from Kosovo. She is currently pursuing a Master’s in Culture Studies at Universidade Católica Portuguesa with a focus on arts and cultural management. Renea is the founder of mini studio, a multidisciplinary space for art and architecture in Prishtina, and serves as the President of the Steering Committee at the National Gallery of Kosovo. Her professional background bridges education, cultural diplomacy, and exhibition production. She has managed production for BAFTA-winning film projects and curated feminist art exchanges between Prishtina and Sarajevo. Her practice focuses on amplifying marginalized narratives and fostering cultural dialogue in the Balkans and beyond.
Website: facebook.com/ministudioks/
Instagram: @reneabi
Renea Behluli is a scholarship holder of the "Fokus International" program, which was launched in cooperation with the Austrian Ministry of Culture (BMWKMS) in 2023. Young cultural workers from Kosovo (2023 - 2025) and South Africa (2025 - 2027) are invited to Austria to complete two-month internships at selected Viennese art institutions, thereby gaining work experience and enriching the host institution through their collaboration.
Renea Behluli's project explores how contemporary queer artists from the Balkans confront erasure and marginalisation through artistic resistance. Her research explores how nationalism, coloniality and queer hostility interact to create systematic invisibility and how artists respond with counter-memories and alternative queer futures.
During her residency at MQ, the artist will support the Kunsthalle Wien team. She will focus on researching residencies and exhibitions as well as the spatial politics of queer memory in curatorial practice. This topic is part of her dissertation, which centres on the artistic practices of Astrit Ismaili and Silvi Naçi. Their works deal with queer futures, experiences of dislocation and counter-archives and offer embodied interventions against exclusionary narratives.
The residency supports the continuation of Behluli's academic and curatorial research. It situates queer art from the Balkans in the European institutional context and contributes to the deepening of transnational solidarities through art.