The Collection

Irena Haiduk is an artist and founder of Yugoexport, a “blind and non-aligned oral corporation” modeled after the former Yugoslav apparel and weapons manufacturer Jugoeksport. Conceived as both artwork and corporate entity, Yugoexport produces images, books, apparel, films, orations, scenographies, and variable spaces, guided by the maxim How To Surround Your Self With Things In The Right Way. Its logic rests on equivalence, loyalty, and solidarity between people and things, seeking to build alternative structures for imagination, exchange, and collective life.

Haiduk’s practice investigates the entanglements of aesthetics and economy, focusing on how infrastructures of production and desire leave visible aesthetic marks. Her projects ask how art, as a field rooted in the making and shaping of desire, might shift our values at a moment when planetary futures are in crisis.

Her work has been presented internationally at documenta 14 (Athens/Kassel), the Istanbul Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Swiss Institute (New York), and Art Basel, among others, and has been published by Sternberg Press. Haiduk frequently collaborates across disciplines, partnering with cultural institutions, designers, and corporations such as Acne Studios.

Since 2018, Haiduk’s studium has been hosted in part by the Department of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice. Current trajectories of her research and practice are organized under the titles Buoyancy, Loving, and The Third Way.