The year-round preparational work on the Youth Biennial 2021 (April 2020 – March 2021) project has been mostly based on the local capacities and topics, i.e. working with young artists as part of the initiative Youth ULUS which was started by ULUS, working with new members of ULUS which during the duration of last year there has been a record amount of membership applications (100), then on the strengthening of inner resources of thought and production of art (speech programs of ULUS during 2020). The Youth ULUS initiative was founded in 2020 as a special program unit of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia for the cooperation with young artists and as a place of incubation of the new members of the Association. The activities of the initiative serve the promotion of young artists as well as their training in terms of an independent organization of an art program. 

During July and August 2020, public preparations were organized for the Youth Biennial project at the Art Pavilion “Cvijeta Zuzoric” and via an online channel of communication. 100 young artists participated in the preparations who had the chance to join in on working with the oldest professional association of artists in the region, creating their own field of action which is completely self-organized – the organization structure and mission of the Youth Biennial. Workshops and lectures of noted experts in the field of contemporary art were held (available to the broader public via the YouTube channel of the Association), and research was conducted around the cultural scene and the institutional infrastructure, the purpose of which was to empower the group of young artists to start their own event this year – an international project under the wing of ULUS. The Project has been, in terms of volunteers, supported by a large number of curators, critics, organizers of cultural events and artists such as Stevan Vuković, Ksenija Đurović, Jelena Vesić, Nada Grozdanić, Branislav Dimitrijević, Irena Ristić, Maja Ćirić, Mirjana Boba Stojadinović, Maja Lalić, Marijana Cvetković, Dejan Vasića, Divna Vuksanović, Isidora Ilić, Aleksandrija Ajduković and Danilo Prnjat. 

Given that working in teams which are horizontally organized requires constant reevaluation of achieved results and further orientation, during January and February 2021, an additional public preparation program was organized – public preparation II, with the intent of working on the reorganization of strengths and integration of new members of the team. The continuation of the public preparation program was organized in seven sessions which were organized by a group of young people who was up to that moment working on the preparation of the Biennial, with the support of mentors who were active in the field of thinking through the horizontal organization, contemporary curatorship practices of production in the field of art and architecture of presentations: PhD Stevan Vuković, PhD Irena Ristić, PhD Maja Lalić, PhD Maja Ćirić, PhD Marijana Cvetković, prof. PhD Pavle Stamenković and PhD Petar Cigić.

In both phases of public preparations intensive communication was maintained with European (Sala D’Art Jove, Barselona, Spain), regional (Institut za savremenu umjetnost Crne Gore, Podgorica, Montenegro, Fakultet za stvari koje se ne mogu naučiti, Skopje, North Macedonia) and local (Dom kulture Studentski grad i Arhitektonski fakultet in Belgrade) associates on the project. Even though the project has associates from the European Union, the Youth Biennial is at its core a local project, initiated so that it can, through a two-year process of education, exchange and production of artworks, establish a horizontal platform for connecting the works of young people in the field of the fine arts of the Balkans. The focus of the project is on the non-established artists, curators, architects and managers who will create their own field of action together, which involves not only the production and performance of artworks but also establishing discourse and a distribution of knowledge. This group of young people also falls into a very socially vulnerable group, especially when looking at it from the economic point of view, given the fact that there doesn’t exist an adequate framework by which one transitions from the end of their academic studies into the professional field and deals with art on a local and international level. 

The idea is that the Biennial be the leader of the international networking process of young actors in the field of art, as well as the organization itself, that through the Youth Biennial the institution of art gains in strength in terms of the exhibition, the organization, the promotion and the interpretation – and for it not to be dependent upon the working of curators and critics, whether foreign or local as well as the available topics and contexts of the exhibition.