Tevfik Rada is a researcher and a PhD candidate in Comparative History in CEU. He studied architecture and sociology in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. His master’s thesis, “Encounters Between Railways and Cinema in the Early Twentieth Century: From Cine-Trains to Agit-Trains”, deals with the political imaginary of railways in the eyes of the early avant-garde movements of Italy and Soviet Union. Tevfik is a co-founder of the research and publishing platform Pykë-Presje — an independent platform working mainly with printed matter and running an independent cultural space and bookshop in Prizren. Rada has participated in many archival exhibitions as a researcher. In 2023, he co-curated the exhibition “Palimpsests of History” in the National Gallery of Kosovo, dealing with the filmic representations of Kosovo during the twilight of Yugoslavia. Together with Sezgin Boynik, he prepared the archival exhibition in SALT called “Translated into Socialism: Turkish Language in Yugoslavia”, which deals with the Turkish national formation during the Socialist Yugoslavia. His research deals with the political role of contemporary art in Kosovo and Serbia throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. As a result, he studied the artistic and institutional interactions that happened throughout these years. His thesis is that despite its critical attitude, contemporary art was unable to break away from the conventional post-socialist nation-state narrative.
You can download his research HERE.