Tarek Abou El Fetouh
(Egypt/Belgium)
Tarek Abou El Fetouh is an independent curator and architect who lives and works in Brussels. His curatorial works include It’s Happening in the Garage”, Alexandria 2000;DisOrientation, House of World Cultures, Berlin in 2003; Roaming Inner Landscapes, Alexandria in 2004 and Sharjah Biennale 9 in 2009. He initiated Meeting Points – Festival for Contemporary Arts and curated the first four editions that took place across several cities in the Middle East. Abou El Fetouh has worked as Artistic Director of Meeting Points with curators Frie Leysen for MP5, Okwui Enwezor for MP6 and the Zagreb based collective WHW for MP7. His curatorial works include the exhibition of Home Works 6, organised by Ashkal Alwan in Beirut 2013, Lest the Two Seas Meet at MoMA, Warsaw in 2015, “The time is out of joint in Sharjah and Gwangju in 2016 and “A Captive of Love” in Red Bricks Museum, Beijing 2017. Tarek Abou El Fetouh is the curator of Abu Dhabi Art performing arts program Durub Al Tawaya.
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Alessio Antoniolli
(Italy)
Alessio Antoniolli is the Director of Gasworks, London, where he leads a programme of residencies, exhibitions and educational projects, working primarily with emerging UK and international artists. Under his directorship the organisation has hosted residencies of over than 300 artists’ residencies from 80 countries around the world. It has also provided the first UK exhibition of Song Dong, Lynette Yiadom Boakye, Renata Lucas, Kemang Wa Lehulere and Naufus Ramirez Figueroa amongst others. Alessio is also the Director of Triangle Network, a global network of artists and grass-roots organisations. He is involved in managing, fundraising and strategic planning for the Network, as well as working with new partners on developing projects such as residencies and artists’ workshops.
Gasworks, Triangle NetworkProposed projects:
Zoe Butt
(Vietnam)
Zoe Butt is the Artistic Director of The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. With a focus on building critically thinking, historically conscious artistic communities, Butt previously served as Executive Director and Curator of Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Director of International Programs at Long March Project in Beijing, China; and Assistant Curator of Contemporary Asian Art at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia. Select curatorial projects include Spirit of Friendship and Poetic Amnesia: Phan Thao Nguyen (2017) and Dislocate: Bui Cong Khanh (2016), The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City; the online exhibition Embedded South(s) (2016), Conscious Realities, Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City (2013–2016); and Disrupting Choreographies, Carré d’Art, Nimes, France (2013). Butt is a member of the Asian Art Council for the Solomon R Guggenheim, New York; a member of Asia 21 Young Leaders of the Asia Society; and in 2015, became a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.
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Heman Chong
Heman Chong Heman Chong is an artist, curator and writer. He received his M.A in Communication Art & Design from The Royal College of Art, London in 2002. His conceptually-charged investigations into how individuals and communities imagine the future generates a multiplicity of objects, images, installations, situations, and texts. In 2006, he produced a writing workshop with Leif Magne Tangen at Project Arts Center in Dublin where they co-authored PHILIP, a science fiction novel, with Mark Aerial Waller, Cosmin Costinas, Rosemary Heather, Francis McKee, David Reinfurt and Steve Rushton. He is currently working on Moderation(s), a project that occurs between Witte de With Contemporary Art in Rotterdam and Spring Workshop in Hong Kong, involving an evolving group of participants generating projects within the framework of rethinking collaborative actions. In his spare time, he runs a nomadic bookshop named LEM1 that specializes in distributing second-hand science fiction and fantasy books.
Related texts:
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Cosmin Costinas
(Romania/China)
Cosmin Costinas is the Executive Director/Curator of Para Site, Hong Kong since 2011. He was Guest Curator at the Dakar Biennale (2018), Curator at Dhaka Art Summit (2018), Co-curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014), Curator of BAK, Utrecht (2008-2011), Co-curator of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2010), and Editor of documenta 12 Magazines, Kassel (2005–2007). At Para Site, Cosmin Costinas oversaw the institution’s major expansion and relocation to a new home in 2015, and curated or co-curated exhibitions including: An Opera for Animals (2019); A beast, a god, and a line (toured at Dhaka Art Summit ‘18, TS1/The Secretariat, Yangon, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2018); Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs (toured at MCAD, Manila and Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2016-2017); Afterwork (toured at ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur, 2016-2017); and A Journal of the Plague Year (toured at The Cube, Taipei, Arko Art Center, Seoul, and Kadist Art Foundation and The Lab, San Francisco, 2013-2015) in recent years, a.o. He co-authored the novel Philip (2007) and has edited and contributed his writing to numerous books, magazines, and exhibition catalogs and has taught and lectured at different universities and institutions around the world.
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Joseph Del Pesco
(USA)
Joseph del Pesco is a curator, writer and online media producer. Since 2009 he has been Director, and this year was appointed International Director of KADIST, with offices in Paris and San Francisco. Previously, he worked at Artists Space (NYC), The Banff Centre, and the UC Davis Museum. He has been in residence at SOMA in Mexico City, Beta-Local in Puerto Rico, The Luminary in St. Louis and ArtPort in Tel Aviv. His short stories about speculative museums have recently appeared in Art21 Magazine and White Fungus Magazine.
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Chto Delat?
(Russia)
The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. The group was constituted in May 2003 in St. Petersburg in an action called “The Refoundation of Petersburg.” Shortly afterward, the original, as yet nameless core group began publishing an international newspaper called Chto Delat?. The name of the group derives from a novel by the Russian 19th-century writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and immediately brings to mind the first socialist worker’s self-organizations in Russia, which Lenin actualized in his own publication, “What is to be done?” (1902). Chto Delat sees itself as an artistic cell and also as a community organizer for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicizing “knowledge production”. The activity of collective takes responsibility for a postsocialist condition and actualization of forgotten and repressed potentiality of the Soviet past and often works as a politics of commemoration.
In 2013, Chto Delat initiated an educational platform—School of Engaged Art in Petersburg and also runs a space called Rosa’s House of Culture.Proposed projects:
Galit Eilat
(Israel)
Galit Eilat is an interdependent curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Since 2018 she is the director of Meduza Foundation. Her projects seeks to develop conditions that enable collective encounters and experiences, underpinned by a critical view towards the status quo. Deploying eclectic, site-specific projects, often in collaboration with grass root, politically active groups, and individuals, Eilat unravels the intertwined themes of political ideology, theology, the nation-state and the production of history. Pivotal within such projects is the process of knowledge dissemination, which departs from the ethos that art is charged with the potential to ignite social change and must, therefore, distance from the nation-state. Her current research trajectories are dealing with the Syndrome of the Present and Totalitarian Art vs Art under Totalitarianism.
In 2001, she founded the Israeli Center for Digital Art where she served as director for ten years. In 2004, she co-founded Maarav, an online arts and culture magazine and in 2007, together with Eva Birkenstock, she founded the Mobile Archive.
Meduza Foundation, Syndrome of the Present, Israeli Center for Digital Art, Maarav, Mobile Archive
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Christine Eyene
(France)
Christine Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator. She is a Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire where she works on Making Histories Visible. Her areas of research and curatorial practice range from contemporary African and Diaspora arts, Black British arts, gendered art discourses, to non-object-based art practices notably sound art. Her other interests include: socially-engaged initiatives, urban culture, music, design, and new media. Eyene was curator of the Summer of Photography 2018 at Bozar, Brussels and artistic director of the 4th International Biennial of Casablanca 2018. She has curated international exhibitions as part of numerous biennials including Printemps de Septembre 2016 (Toulouse, France); EVA International 2016 (Limerick, Ireland); Format International Photography Festival 2015 (Nottingham, UK); Summer of Photography 2014 (Brussels, Belgium); 10th Dak’Art Biennial 2012 (Dakar, Senegal); 3rd Photoquai Biennial of World Images 2011 (Paris, France).
Summer of Photography 2018, Making Histories Visible
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Pauline J Yao
(China)
Pauline J. Yao is a curator, writer, and co-founder of the nonprofit art space Arrow Factory in Beijing. A co-curator of the 2009 Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism and recipient of the CCAA (Contemporary Chinese Art Award) Art Critic Award, she is a regular contributor to Artforum, e-flux Journal, and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. She is the author of In Production Mode: Contemporary Art in China (2008), and co-edited 3 Years: Arrow Factory (Sternberg Press, 2011). Yao served previously as Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and holds an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. She joined M+ as Curator in November 2012.
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Eungie Joo
(Korea)
Eungie Joo is curator of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Previously, she served as director of the 5th Anyang Public Art Project/APAP 5, Anyang, Korea (2017); curator of Sharjah Biennial 12: The past, the present, the possible (2015); director of Art and Cultural Programs, Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2012–2014) and Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs, New Museum, New York (2007–2012), where she spearheaded the Museum as Hub program and commissioned the monthly seminar Night School by Anton Vidokle (2008–2009) and organised the New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables (2012). Joo served as Commissioner of the Korean Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), where she presented Condensation: Haegue Yang. She was founding Director and Curator of the Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles (2003–2007), where she developed residencies and exhibitions by SUPERFLEX, Damián Ortega, Sora Kim, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kara Walker, and others.
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Miguel A. López
(Peru)
Miguel A. López is writer, researcher, and Co-Director and Chief Curator of TEOR/éTica in San José, Costa Rica. His work investigates collaborative dynamics and feminist re-articulations of art and culture in recent decades. He has published in periodicals such as Artforum, Afterall, ramona, e-flux journal, Art in America, Art Journal, Manifesta Journal, among others. He has recently curated Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2019, and MUAC-UNAM, Mexico City, 2020; and Victoria Cabezas and Priscilla Monge: Give Me What You Ask For at Americas Society, New York, 2019. In 2016 he was recipient of the Independent Vision Curatorial Award from ICI (Independent Curators International), New York.
2015 Curator of the first solo show in Europe of Giuseppe Campuzano: Linea de Vida – Museo Travesti del Peru, at the Visible Office and Project Space, Brussels
2020 Author of the Collectively Annotated Bibliography. On Artistic Practices in the expanded field of Art
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Raqs Media Collective
(India)
Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) follows its self-declared imperative of kinetic contemplation to produce a trajectory that is restless in its forms and methods, yet concise with the infra procedures that it invents. The collective makes contemporary art, edits books, curates exhibitions, and stages situations. It has collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers, curators, and theatre directors, and has made films. It co-founded Sarai the inter-disciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi?in 2001, where it initiated processes that have left a deep impact on contemporary culture in India.
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Sofia Olascoaga
(Mexico)
Sofia Olascoaga studied plastic arts at the National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving "La Esmeralda" and curatorial studies at the Independent Studies Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2010). She has been a curatorial research fellow at Independent Curators International (2011). Co-curator of the 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016), academic curator of the Contemporary Art University Museum (2014-2015) and Public Education and Programs coordinator of the Carrillo Gil Art Museum (2007-2010). Her research Entre Utopía y desencanto, presents models of intentional and alternative communities in education, created in Mexico between the 50s and 80s, particularly the development of the Intercultural Documentation Center (CIDOC) and the impact of the ideas of Ivan Illich. Sofía is a member of the School Network Another Roadmap.
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Bisi Silva
(Nigeria)
Bisi Silva was an independent curator and the founder/director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, which opened in December 2007. She was co-curator of ‘The Progress of Love’, a transcontinental collaboration across three venues in US and Nigeria (2012 – 2013). She was co-curator of J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere: Moments of Beauty’, Kiasma, Helsinki (2011). She was also co-curator for the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece, ‘Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty’ in September 2009. In 2006 Silva was one of the curators for the Dakar Biennale in Senegal.
Silva has participated in several international conferences and symposia and written essays for many publications as well as for international art magazines and was on the editorial board of N.Paradoxa, an international feminist art journal and was the guest editor for Africa and African Diaspora Issue of N.Paradoxa.Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA)
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Pelin Tan
(Turkey)
Pelin Tan is sociologist, art historian, researcher on transversal methodology, alternative pedagogies, and conflict territories. Tan has been an associate professor of architecture at Mardin Artuklu University, Mardin, Turkey (2013–2018), and a visiting associate professor at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia (2018); Hong Kong
Polytechnic University (2016); Hong Kong Design Trust (2016–2017); and The Japan Foundation, Tokyo (2012). She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Boston, US (2020–2021), and a member of the curatorial board of IBA Stuttgart 2027. She also served as a guest curator for the I-DEA archival project at Matera 2019, European Capital of Culture, Italy. Tan was named the Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College in the United States.
Pelin Tan Blog, MIT program in art, culture and technology, ArtikIsler Colective2020 Author of the Collectively Annotated Bibliography. On Artistic Practices in the expanded field of Art
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Claire Tancons
(Trinidad)
Claire Tancons is a New Orleans-based curator, writer, and researcher whose work in recent years has reached global audiences through a pioneering approach to large-scale performance. A native of Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, Tancons has curated many projects over the last decade that feature novel artistic and curatorial ideas stemming from Carnival, civic rituals, popular movements, and public ceremonial culture at large. Among the most noteworthy were historically grounded mass processional performances presented at venues including South Korea’s 7th Gwangju Biennale in 2008; South Africa’s CAPE 09, the second Cape Town biennial in 2009; and Sweden’s 2013 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art. In 2008/2009 Tancons served as associate curator for the Prospect.1 New Orleans international biennial, and last year she was invited to London by Tate Modern to curate a performance in Turbine Hall as part of its BMW Tate Live series. There, her large-scale Up Hill Down Hall: An Indoor Carnival reflected her goal of “expanding the historical purview of performance to more fully engage African diasporic and circum-Atlantic perspectives in art history and curatorial practice.”
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