Jelisaveta Rapaić is an artist, independent curator, researcher, and educator working mainly within the textile medium, through which she often explores the subversive potential of mistakes. In her theoretical and artistic research, she examines how the practice of creating art in the textile medium can be fully emancipated and considered a feminist and liberating practice, besides inherently being built upon traditional gender roles and labor division that we interpret it through. In this process, she is interested in the mechanisms by which we individually and collectively cope with current pressing issues, and the ways in which different systems of care are established and function or fail.

She holds a Bachelor of Textile Design from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade (2019) and a Master’s in Intermedia from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (2021), where she is currently (2024 onwards) a candidate for a PhD in Art Theory with a research topic, Feminist interpretations in contemporary textile and fiber art. Until 2024, she worked as a public program curator and PR for Kunsthalle Bratislava, and since 2020, she has run a pop-up hair salon, WeAreOpen, where she offers hair-cutting therapy sessions in exchange for other goods and services.

Her solo exhibitions include I develop calluses, I produce Vanity, Gallery Obrat, Maribor (2024), Fed up Futures, DAS WEISSE HAUS, Vienna (duo solo, 2024), I will build a wall only to hide u inside, Ravnikar Gallery, Ljubljana (2024), Salon Jelisaveta: true hell comes from within, PAF Gallery, Olomouc (2023). Some of the group exhibitions she took part in are Faux Twin, VUNU, Kunsthalle Košice (2025), Safe Zone, Liget Gallery,Budapest Biennial (2025), DILITHIUM: CHAPTER 2 DOPPELGANGERS, Exile Gallery, Vienna (2024), Its Okay to Cry, Organ Vida Festival, UGM, Maribor (2023), Whoever Settles in a Perfect Home Will Have to Move, Glassbox Nord, Paris (2023). Her curatorial undertakings include The rotten smell is you (Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023 & Belgrade Cultural Center, 2024);…and they lived…Kunsthalle Bratislava (2023). She took part in the Cite Internationale des Arts, artist residency in Paris (2021), Guest Rooms, artist residency in Maribor (2024), WHW Akademija in Zagreb (2023), and was part of a temporary collective QMA in Vienna (2024), BAK (basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht) Summer-Winter School in Bratislava (2019).

During her time at AiR 351, she hopes to further develop a recent project with an umbrella title Arms* (As in to hold, to bear, to create, and/or destroy) that treats common textile related tools, and the very handmaking of it, as a weapon and language of resistance. Guided by a feminist exploration of the potentials of creases, handmade language, mending and bending, and the roles of different textiles and their possible uses. However, she is sure her time in Lisbon and Cascais will be locally influenced, and she is very open to seeing where this takes her research.