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“Greek Collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos to Receive ICI’s Annual Leo Award” from Gallerist NY

Posted on July 21, 2014

By Nate Freeman

“Dimitris Daskalopoulos, the Greek entrepreneur, mega-collector and benefactor of art institutions the world over, will receive the Leo Award, an annual honor presented by Independent Curators International, Gallerist has learned. The award, which is named after the dealer Leo Castelli, will be presented to Mr. Daskalopoulos at a gala dinner and auction in New York this fall.

“Before vaulting into the highest echelons of several world class institutions—the Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Leadership Council of the New Museum, the Tate International Council, among others—Mr. Daskalopoulos built his family’s modest dairy company into Viviartia, the greek foodstuffs behemoth. An accruing fortune and a keen interest in contemporary art led to the creation and expansion of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, founded in 1994. The collection now comprises over 500 works by 170 artists, including Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Kiki Smith.”

To view this article click here.

Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

 Photos from Summer Cocktails at McCarren Hotel & Pool

Posted on July 22, 2014

On Wednesday, July 16 over 200 of ICI’s friends and collaborators joined us at our annual Summer Cocktails event at the newly renovated McCarren Hotel & Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Staff and guests enjoyed Peroni beer and music by DJ Aaron Pfenning, while watching the sunset cascade over Manhattan from the roof top bar Sheltering Sky.

For more photos from the event, please visit BFA NYC.

Thank you to our sponsor:

Thank you to our sponsor Peroni Italy

“15 Rising Curators Nominated for ICI Award” announced in artnet News

Posted on September 24, 2014

“Next time an art world outsider asks you, by way of small talk, who the hot young curators of the day are, all you need to do is recite this list,” Benjamin Sutton covers Independent Vision Curatorial Award nominee announcement for artnet news here.

Eva Barois De Caevel is the 2014 Independent Vision Curatorial Award Honoree

Posted on October 28, 2014

Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has selected Eva Barois De Caevel as the recipient of ICI’s 2014 Independent Vision Curatorial Award.

The Award will be presented by Nancy Spector at ICI’s 2014 Annual Benefit & Auction taking place on November 17 at the Cunard Building, 25 Broadway in New York City. Eva Barois De Caevel is an independent curator based in Paris and the assistant curator at Raw Material Company, Dakar. She was selected from a shortlist of 15 emerging curators from around the world who were nominated by 15 internationally established curators for the strengths of exhibitions or projects they have recently produced.

Eva Barois De Caevel’s unflinching curatorial practice tackles some of today’s most urgent issues, including sexuality and human rights, in a postcolonial world. Working collaboratively to encourage dialogue and participation among her audiences, with issues both local and global, she is courageously expanding the curatorial field.” – Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Established in 2010 as an initiative of the Gerrit Lansing Education Fund, the Independent Vision Curatorial Award reflects ICI’s commitment to supporting international curators early in their careers who have shown exceptional creativity and prescience in their exhibition-making, research, and related writing. The award, including a $3,000 stipend towards a new project, is given every two years to an early or mid-career curator to support their independent practice through ICI, and give them a platform to pursue and publish their research online. The Independent Vision Curatorial Award is significant in that it is one of the very few awards in the world to recognize rising curatorial talent. Past winners include: Doryun Chong, Chief Curator at M+ Hong Kong, Nav Haq, Curator at Muhka, Antwerp and Jay Sanders, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This year we reached out to 15 international curators and ICI collaborators, and asked them to nominate one emerging or mid-career curator for this award. From those nominations, Nancy Spector selected and will present this year’s award at the ICI Annual Benefit & Auction on November 17, 2014.

The 2014 Independent Vision Curatorial Award Nominating Committee includes: Zdenka Badovinac: Director, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana (Slovenia); Iwona Blazwick: Director, Whitechapel Gallery (UK); Zoe Butt; Executive Director and Curator, Sàn Art (Vietnam); Rosina Cazali: Independent Curator (Guatemala); Reem Fadda: Associate Curator, Middle Eastern Art, Abu Dhabi Project, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (UAE); Gridthiya Gaweewong; Artistic Director, Jim Thompson Art Center (Thailand); Abdellah Karroum: Founding Artistic Director of L’appartement 22 (Qatar); Koyo Kouoh: Artistic Director, Raw Material Company (Senegal); Michy Marxuach: Co-director of Beta-Local (Puerto Rico); Riason Naidoo: Independent Curator (South Africa); Valerie Cassel Oliver: Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (US); José Roca: Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art, Tate Modern, London, and Artistic Director of FLORA, Bogotá, Colombia; Claire Tancons: Curator (US); Philip Tinari: Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (China).

This year’s nominees:

Eva Barois De Caevel: Independent curator and researcher
Eva Barois De Caevel is assistant curator at Raw Material Company, Dakar, and works as an independent curator. Eva graduated from the Université de Paris-Sorbonne Paris IV in Contemporary Art History in 2011 and in Curatorial Training in 2012, with her research focusing primarily on moving images. She has been working concurrently on academic research as well as on postcolonial questions and socially engaged practices in contemporary art, and on their interaction: how socially engaged practices in contemporary art can become think tanks on postcolonial issues.

She completed a curatorial residency at Raw Material Company – centre for art, knowledge and society, Dakar, which consisted of conceiving a yearlong program (January 2014 to January 2015) on sexual liberties in Africa through contemporary African art. She curated the first event of the program: Who Said It Was Simple. The exhibition included screenings, debates, a performance, and a seminar. She continued her collaboration with director Koyo Kouoh, working with her on several projects, such as Body Talk – Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of African Women Artists (to be held at WIELS, Brussels, in February 2015), and Streamlines, a project that makes the oceans the metaphorical focal point for an international group exhibition which will examine the cultural repercussion of the global stream of goods and trade between the South and the North (to be held at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, in October 2015). Her next projects will focus on ways of displaying colonial legacies and contemporary imperialisms in vernacular and daily elements (sexuality, language, body image, garments, food, etc.) as well as through art forms and specific curatorial tools. She was part of the first TURN Meeting On Perspectives, Facts and Fictions (June 26-28, 2014, Berlin), a project of Kulturstifung Des Bundes, Germany. The TURN fund was established in 2012 with the purpose of promoting artistic exchange and cooperation between German and African artists and institutions.

She is co-founder of Cartel de Kunst, an international collective and solidarity network of emerging curators based in Paris.

Stefan Benchoam: Co-founder, Co-director, Proyectos Ultravioleta and NuMu
Stefan Benchoam (Guatemala City, 1983) is an artist and exhibition maker with a double B.A. in Fine Arts and Telecommunications from Indiana University (USA), and a strong interest in collaboration.

His work as an artist is multifaceted, with at least two distinctive lines of research: one in the public realm through actions and interventions, the other, which uses informality to question the myths of authenticity, the artist, and of art itself. His work as an exhibition maker aims to push the formats, strategies and venues of how exhibitions are created and experienced.

Through these shifting roles, Benchoam blurs the lines between the work of artist and curator.

As an artist, he has had solo-shows in La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2013), The White Cubicle Toilet Gallery (London, 2011) and La Loseta (San Juan, 2011), and has participated in numerous international group exhibitions. As an exhibition maker, he has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions in a variety of alternative project spaces and institutions.

He is the co-founder/co-director of Proyectos Ultravioleta- a multifaceted platform for experimentation in contemporary art, based in the heart of Guatemala City. He is also co-founder of the Buró de Intervenciones Públicas, a collective which develops low-cost, high-impact interventions in various cities worldwide and of the Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (NuMu) which positions itself as Guatemala’s first contemporary art museum. Additionally, he is the Artistic Director of suelta, a bi-weekly online publication, which aims to bridge the gap between contemporary Latin American art and literature.

Bao Dong: Independent curator and art critic
Bao Dong (b. 1979) is an art critic and independent curator based in Beijing. He graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy in 2006 with an M.A. in Art History and has curated exhibitions for a wide range of art organizations since 2005. In contributing essays to the artistic dialogue and other forms of involvement, Bao has established himself as a leading curator and critic of work by the “new generation.” Since 2013, he has partially joined the work team of A4 Contemporary Arts Center in an advisory capacity. He is also a contributing editor for LEAP magazine and a guest writer for “cn.NYTtimes.com” and “artforum.com.cn”. His articles have been widely published in many publications as well as artist monographs, including Dushu, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Art World, Art China, Art Today, Arts Criticism, Fine Arts Literature, Jiangsu Pictorial, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, among others. In 2014, he was awarded Asian Cultural Council (ACC) fellowship grant.

In 2013, Dong conceived of a publication initiative with three other curators and critics, which is the annual publication of a journal focused on the topic research, discussion, archiving, and exhibition study of Chinese contemporary art, with support from the formation of an alliance among art professionals and non-profit art museums across China. The first issue of the journal, supported by Times Museum, Guangzhou, is expected to be launched between 2014-2015.

 

Anne Dressen: Curator, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Anne Dressen is a curator at ARC, the contemporary art department of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Her exhibitions question the unofficial or disregarded artistic practices as compared to the traditional fine arts, by focusing on several topics such as sound, music video, copying and reproduction, the craft or the decorative, in relation to cultural, gender and colonial issues. She holds a bachelor degree in Literature (Sorbonne University, Paris 4) and a Master in Art History (Ecole du Louvre, Paris and Sorbonne University, Paris 1) and in Museum Studies (New York University).

Among her exhibitions: Off the Record (2004), Playback (2007), Sturtevant. The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking (2010), Seconde main (2010), La Demeure joyeuse (2012) and Decorum. Carpets and tapestries by artists (2013), recently on view at the Power Station of art in Shanghai (2014). In 2015, she will co-curate Carol Rama’s retrospective (an overlooked Italian artist born in 1918) in collaboration with the MACBA in Barcelona (Spain), touring then to Helsinki (Finland), Dublin (Ireland) and Torino (Italy) in 2015/2016.

Her texts are published in institutional catalogues, artists’ publications, and in magazines (such as Artforum, Frog, Petunia, Flashart International, The Exhibitionist). She teaches art history at ECAL, Lausanne (Switzerland).

In 2009 she was a recipient for the Villa Medicis / Off the Wall residency grant and spent 3 months in China conducting research on the reality and fantasy of fake and copy practices and cultures in Ancient and contemporary China.

 

Inti Guerrero: Associate Artistic Director-Curator, TEOR/eTica
Inti Guerrero (1983, Bogotá, Colombia) is an art critic and curator based in Hong Kong, periodically working in San Jose, Costa Rica as Associate Artisitic Director of TEOR/éTica (founded in 1999). He studied History and Theory of Art and Architecture in Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia and Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil and attended De Appel’s Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam the Netherlands.

In TEOR/eTica he has curated (selection): Entre Concreto, 2014; New Fantasies (co- curated with Lina castañeda), 2013; The Where I am is Vanishing- Mariana Castillo Deball, 2012; Men Amongst the Ruins, 2012; Metallic Building, 2012; and co-curated the international congress Temas Centrales 2.

Recent curatorial projects include: A Chronicle of Interventions (co-curated with Shoair Mavlian), Tate Modern, London; Josephine Baker and Le Corbusier in Rio – A Transatlantic Affair, (co-curated with Carlos Maria Romero), Museum of Art of Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story (co-curated with Cosmin Costinaş), Para Site, Hong Kong, 2013 touring throughout 2014-2015 at TheCube, Project Space, Taipei; ARKO art centre, Seoul and Kadist, San Francisco; Institute of Tropical Fascism guest project in Bergen Assembly, Bergen, 2013; Kadist. Pathways into a collection, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2012; The City of the Naked Man, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2010; Flying Down to Earth, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo-MARCO, Vigo and FRAC Lorraine, Metz, 2010; Duet for Cannibals, Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, 2010; and Light Years-Cristina Lucas, Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo.

His writings have appeared in Afterall, ArtNexus, Metropolis M, Nero, Manifesta Journal, and Ramona, among other publications and exhibition catalogues. Guerrero has been a visiting professor a the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam and a guest lecturer and symposium speaker at Chelsea College for the Arts, London; California College for the Arts, San Francisco; and The Getty, Los Angeles.

 

Agung Hujatnikajennong: Independent curator and lecturer
Currently a freelance curator and lecturer, Agung Hujatnika a.k.a Agung Hujatnikajennong was the in-house curator (2001-2012) at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia. He obtained his doctoral degree (2012) from the Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia. His research focuses on the history of exhibition making, curatorial practices and the formation of the Indonesian contemporary art world. Tracing the development since the pre-independence era up to the present, it highlights the connection between of the wave of post-Cold War internationalization and the proliferation of regional exhibitions, the curatorial turn in Indonesia in the 1990s, and its shift following the Asian art boom in the 2000s.

Since 1999, Hujatnika has been contributing as writer and editor for various art publications in Indonesia and abroad. He carried out curatorial residency programs in Australia (2002; 2010) and Japan (2004; 2011), and has been working closely with artist initiative, ruangrupa, in Jakarta, especially as the curator for the OK Video Festival (2003; 2005; 2011). Focusing primarily on Indonesian and Southeast Asian contemporary artists, he has curated solo and group exhibitions with different institutions, including Yasumasa Morimura (2001); Ecstaticus Mundi (2002); AVICON – Asia Video Art Conference (2004, co-curated with Videoart Center Tokyo); Bandung New Emergence (2006; 2008; 2011); I/CON, solo exhibition of Agus Suwage (2007); Nobody’s Land – Heri Dono (2008); The Fitting Room – Mella Jaarsma (2009); Loss of the Real (2010); Java’s Machine: Family Chronicles – Jompet Kuswidananto (2011); Human Resource Development – Ade Darmawan (2012); copy select all – Poklong Anading (2013); Threshold – Takashi Kuribayashi (2013), and; Things Happen when We Remember – FX Harsono (2014).

Hujatnika has a particular interest on the issue of art world’s mobility and international collaboration, which he has developed in his curatorial works for Fluid Zones – 13th Jakarta Biennale (2009); Exquisite Corpses and other Memories at the Bandung Pavilion of Shanghai Biennale (2012, co-curated with Charles Esche and ArtHub Asia), and; Not a Dead End – Jogja Biennale XII, Equator #2 (2013, co-curated with Sarah Rifky). He has also involved in the establishment of Master Program of Art Management and Curatorship (2012) at his alma mater, and continued to teach there since 2008.

 

Naima Keith: Assistant Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem
Naima J. Keith is an Assistant Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem where she focuses on themes of identity and conceptual practices in contemporary art, particularly as it relates to artists of African descent. Since joining the Studio Museum in 2011, Keith has organized numerous large-scale exhibitions and catalogues. Her most recent exhibition Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974 – 1989 (2014) toured nationally and was received with widespread critical acclaim, Glenn Kaino: 19.83 (2014) marked the New York debut of this Los Angeles based artist and The Shadows Took Shape (co-curated with Zoe Whitley, 2013), which featured twenty-nine international artists and over 60 works of art that represent contemporary art and Afrofuturist aesthetics was considered groundbreaking. At her tenure at the Studio Museum, Keith has also organized Robert Pruitt: Women (2013), Fore (co-curated with Lauren Haynes and Thomas J. Lax, 2012), Caribbean: Crossroads of the World (Institutional Curator, 2012), Collected. Ritual (2011) and John Outterbridge: The Rag Factory II (2011). She comes to the Studio Museum from a position as Curatorial Fellow at the Hammer Museum, where she worked closely with guest curator Kellie Jones on the critically acclaimed exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (2011). Her essays have been featured in publications for The Studio Museum in Harlem, Hammer Museum, LAXART, MoMA PS1, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art and the University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara. Keith has also taught at Loyola Marymount University, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Santa Barbara and University of Missouri.

Keith received a master’s degree in contemporary art from University of California, Los Angeles, completing her thesis on Los Angeles based artist Mark Bradford and a bachelor’s degree in art history from Spelman College.

 

Thomas Lax: Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Lax is currently Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art. For the previous seven years, he worked at The Studio Museum in Harlem, most recently as Assistant Curator, where he organized over a dozen exhibitions. His interests include American and international contemporary art, with a particular focus on dance, performance, and video, as well as socially-engaged practices in all media.

Lax is motivated by investigations of the ways social contexts—be they racial, geographic or interpersonal—are subtly embedded in how we read and interpret formal decisions artists make. Conceiving of cultural information and materials this way allows for both a sense of reverence to the place and time in which is work is made, as well as a sense of play as he works with a specific audience and place to create new contexts as a curator.

Lax has written for artist monographs locally and internationally for venues including Artists Space, New York; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; MoMA PS1, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. I am a contributor to Artforum, Art in America, Art Journal and Mousse.

He has lectured at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2014); the University of California, Los Angeles (2013); Columbia University, New York (2013); the Jeu de Paume, Paris, (2013); the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art (2013); and Danspace Project, New York (2012 and 2014).

Lax is a faculty member at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts; on the Advisory Committee Vera List Center for Arts and Politics; on the Arts Advisory Committee of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; a member of the Catalyst Circle at The Laundromat Project; and on the Advisory Board of Recess.

He has served on juries at New York Live Arts (2011 and 2012), Art Matters (2012 and 2014) and the Pew Center for Art and Heritage.

Lax received a BA from Brown University in Africana Studies and Art/Semiotics, and an MA in Modern Art from Columbia University.

 

Tevž Logar: Independent Curator
Tevž Logar currently works as a freelance curator. Between 2009 and 2014, he was the artistic director of Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia. His curatorial and editorial work focuses on long-term research based on and balanced between presentations of historical and contemporary artistic positions. He is also interested in re-questioning the exhibition as a “medium of communication”, in relation to its formal, theoretical, social and geo-political conditions. In 2013, Logar curated the exhibition in the Slovenian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennial. Since 2009, he has been lecturing on the History of Art of 20th century at the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana (AVA). Recently, he has also worked as a screenwriter for a full-length feature documentary, Project Cancer, Ulay’s journal from November to November. In 2014, he co-founded Ulay Foundation in Amsterdam and became one of the trustees of the artist’s oeuvre. Logar currently lives and works in Ljubljana.

 

Emile Maurice: Resident curator, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape
Emile Maurice was born in Cape Town, South Africa. As a curator, author, and teacher he has worked in the arts and culture and heritage sectors for many years. He received is MA in Art History from Syracuse University in 1981. His primary interests are in rewriting South African cultural history with a view to greater equity and representation in the context of colonial and apartheid marginalization. His major exhibitions have been featured in the Botswana Arts Festival, Garbone, Botswana. He is currently a curator at the University of the Western Cape.

Emile is responsible for curating the exhibition, Uncontained: opening the Community Arts Project archive (2012), public of a collection of artworks that has largely lain dormant in the storerooms of Community Arts Program (CAP) and Arts and Media Access Centre (AMAC), and the re-activation of the archive from neglect by mainstream cultural history.

 

Diana Nawi: Associate Curator, Pérez Art Museum Miami
Diana Nawi is an associate curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Nawi’s work as a curator emerges from a commitment to institution building as both a creative and civic undertaking. Prior to joining PAMM, where she is part of a team of curators responsible the inaugural program of the newly reopened museum, Nawi worked as an assistant curator on the Abu Dhabi Project of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. PAMM and the Guggenheim Foundation both combine a focus on international and transnational artists and cultural movements with a deep interest in local context, and her work at both institutions has re-affirmed Nawi’s belief in the crucial role museums play in writing and rethinking histories, and building and contributing to communities through the establishment of public dialogue.

Responding to context, both in geographic and intellectual terms, Nawi is committed to a curatorial practice that serves artists and communities, nurtures a conceptualization of what it means to be “off center,” and creates a space for open discourse around art and ideas. She is interested in artistic practices that reflect an engagement with issues of place, identity, and political imagination and has recently worked with artists such as Yael Bartana, Nicole Cherubini, Adler Guerrier, Iman Issa, LOS JAICHACKERS (Julio Cesar Morales and Eamon Ore-Giron), Bouchra Khalili, and Nari Ward to develop new projects and exhibitions. Nawi understands the role of the museum curator as bringing to light vital, if often overlooked, histories, narratives, and possibilities.

 

Mary Pansanga: Independent Curator
Mary Pansanga is an independent Bangkok-based curator with a background in film and moving image. She has worked curating exhibitions as well as film festivals. She is currently launching ‘cloud’, an ongoing project that generates the idea of flexibility of both the spatial structures and the program space, transmitting ideas in contemporary art and moving image work which underlies their perspectives and practices, serving as a meeting platform for communication, education and open-ended dialogue.

 

 

Marina Reyes Franco: Independent curator, Co-founder and Director, La Ene
Marina Reyes Franco is an art historian, independent curator and co-founder and director of La Ene – Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She received a BA in Art History from the University of Puerto Rico and a MA in Argentine and Latin American Art History at IDAES-UNSAM, Argentina. She started her career working on the Jack & Irene Delano archive at the Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín, where she helped organize the collection of photographs, drawings and other personal material belonging to the artists.  Before turning to curating, she worked as an arts writer for various publications in Puerto Rico. Since 2010, she has been working at La Ene, the museum she co-founded with Gala Berger as a critical intervention in the Buenos Aires art scene, and contributes regularly curating exhibitions.  In 2010 she was a LIPAC [Contemporary Art Practices Research Laboratory] fellow at the University of Buenos Aires, a resident at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2012) and Phosphorus in São Paulo, Brazil (2013), as well as a Jumex Foundation Scholarship awardee for the ICI Curatorial Intensive in Mexico City (2014). In 2014, she co-curated Barrio Joven, the emerging gallery and artist-run initiatives section at arteBA. She has continued to write in ArtPulse, Mama Lince, Adelante, Revista Sauna, The Creators Project, Beta Local’s El Diario, Ramona, Revista CIA, the Guggenheim UBS MAP Perspectives blog and various exhibition catalogues. Born Wild, a book on the work of Gala Berger was published last year by the Sagayo & Pardon Collection.  She has been invited to speak and run workshops on writing and curating at the University of Puerto Rico and Centro León in the Dominican Republic. Her research interests include the work of Esteban Valdés, the alternative circulation strategies of graphic art, post-colonial theory, feminism, museum studies and new museology, autonomous art projects, and artistic and literary manifestations in the frontier of political action. Upcoming projects include an exhibition about contemporary art practice in Puerto Rico and curating a residency project by Chemi Rosado Seijo, both at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in San Juan.

 

Gaia Tedone: Independent Curator (London, UK/Milan, Italy)
Gaia Tedone (b. in Bari, Italy 1982) is an independent curator based in London.
She holds a BA in Economics for the Arts, Culture and Communication from Luigi Bocconi University, Milan (2005), an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths College, London (2008) and was a Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2010). In 2013-2014, she was granted a Curatorial Fellowship funded by the Arts Council of England and organised by Whitechapel Gallery and Contemporary Art Society in collaboration with the Brighton & Hove Museums. The results of this period of research across the South of England culminated in the display entitled Twixt Two Worlds which is currently on show at Whitechapel Gallery, London and will tour to Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne in the fall. Concurrently, Tedone has undertaken the position of Project Curator of the 8th edition of the Young Curators Residency Programme at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, supervising a small team of international curators in the delivery of an exhibition and publication inspired by the Italian art context.

From 2012 to 2013, Tedone worked within Tate Modern’s curatorial department, assisting on acquisitions and displays for the Collection of Photography and International Art, and was involved in the planning and organization of photography displays, such as Carl Andre and Lewis BaltzModernist PhotographyMark Ruwedel and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. Alongside assisting in the management of the Photography and Middle East and North Africa Acquisitions Committees, she undertook substantial research for the collection of time-based media art. Previously, she was an Assistant Curator in charge of Exhibitions, Projects and Collection at The David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2008-10), where she actively contributed to the conception and delivery of audience-focused exhibitions and events in collaboration with international artists and curators

Tedone is engaged with artistic and curatorial practices that respond to the social and political context we live in. Her involvement with the medium of photography began with an undergraduate thesis entitled Photography as a source for history: the experience of the Farm Security Administration (2005), in which she analyzed the relevance of the FSA’s documentation within the social and political history of the U.S. and its contribution to the history of photography as an artistic form. Since then, her research in the field of photography has significantly expanded and today embraces enquiries into the fields of visual culture and media studies, with a particular focus on issues related to the critique of representation and the shifting conditions of images within contemporary culture at large. She is interested in investigating the role of documentary practices in relation to the geographical and psychological displacement emerging from within the cultural cartography of globalization. She considers dialogue and confrontation the very essence of curatorial practice and she is invested in exploring strategies to prompt dialogue between historical and contemporary works and to open up art to a variety of disciplines, audiences and contexts.

 

Natalia Valencia: Independent curator
Natalia Valencia Arango (Bogotá, 1984) is an independent curator currently based between Paris and Mexico City. Her curatorial projects and writings depart from an interest towards language,  non western conceptions of time and systems of belief, while also enquiring into the phenomenology of the exhibition space.

Her recent curatorial projects include A water staircase at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France (2013), Azul equivocation, Julia Rometti & Victor Costales, at L´appartement 22 in Rabat, Morrocco (2013), Crying for The march of humanity, Christian Jankowski at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in México City, Mexico (2012), A series of possible memories at Museo Quinta de Bolívar in Bogotá, Colombia (2011), Ultramarica at Proyectos Ultravioleta in Guatemala (2010). She is currently preparing a solo exhibition by Cyprien Gaillard at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City in 2015.

In 2013 she worked as fellow researcher of Latin American modern art for Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, where she contributed to the preparation of the Modernités plurielles, 1905-1970 exhibition of the modern collection of the museum (2013-2015), under the direction of Catherine Grenier.

She has written for Kaleidoscope, The Paris Triennale, SUR and for various exhibition catalogues. In 2011 she conducted the seminar Unlearning the future at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, with Milena Bonilla and Luisa Ungar. She received her BFA from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and her MFA from Concordia University in Montreal.

Join us and meet the winner at the 2014 Annual Benefit & Auction on Monday, November 17, 2014 at the Cunard Building at 25 Broadway. To stay updated on this event or for ticket inquiries contact Jenn Hyland at jenn@curatorsintl.org.

ICI Annual Summer Cocktails at Artsy Headquarters

Posted on December 15, 2015

On Wednesday, July 15, ICI’s closest friends and collaborators joined us at our annual Summer Cocktails event to celebrate 40 years of ICI programming in New York City and around the world. Staff and guests enjoyed Club-Mate cocktails and breathtaking views of Manhattan at Artsy Headquarters in Tribeca.

Susan Hapgood and ICI Trustee, Bridget Finn. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

ICI Director of Research and Public Programs, María del Carmen Carrión. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

ICI Trustees, Mel & Ann Schaffer; ICI Director-at-Large, Kate Fowle; and Alex Logsdail. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

Sarah Arison and ICI’s Exhibitions Coordinator, Heather Jones. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

Desiree Almodovar and Jennifer Pomerantz. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

ICI Independents, Paul Cossu and Sabrina Hahn; Ed Victori; ICI Independent, Celine Mo. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

ICI Trustee, Barbara Toll. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

Michael Smith (L), Elaine Goldman (RC), and guests . Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

ICI Trustee, Noreen Ahmad. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

Jessica Man and Elisabeth Sherman. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

ICI Independents, Jessica Hodin and Rebecca Taylor. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

Kimsooja. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

Meredith Johnson and Cole Akers. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

Stein Bjelland; Christofer Hedbrandh; ICI Exhibitions Coordinator, Heather Jones; and Margrethe Aanestad. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI.

ICI Executive Director, Renaud Proch. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI. Photo: Sarah Jacobs for ICI. Thank you to our sponsor: Club-Mate

ICI Honors Marian Goodman with the 2016 Leo Award

Posted on July 1, 2016

The Leo Award named after the early ICI supporter, renowned art dealer Leo Castelli, was created to recognize outstanding achievements in advancing the field of contemporary art. With the Leo Award this year, ICI continues to commemorate Castelli’s legacy by recognizing for the first time another pioneer gallerist.

This year ICI is thrilled to honor Marian Goodman, a steadfast advocate for artists and contemporary art, with the Leo Award. For half a century, Marian Goodman has shown deep commitment to fostering the careers of some of the most significant and respected artists of our times, with a distinctive vision — international in scope, thoughtful, and always intimately supportive of the creative process.

In 1965, Mrs. Goodman founded Multiples, which published prints, multiples, and books by leading American and European artists, including John Baldessari (ICI Trustee, 1994–2000), Marcel Broodthaers, Roy Lichtenstein (ICI Leo Award 1997), and Gerhard Richter. In 1977, she opened Marian Goodman Gallery with an exhibition of Broodthaers, the Belgian artist’s first in the U.S. Since then, the gallery has led the way in introducing international artists to American audiences, while also opening exhibition spaces in Paris in 1997, and most recently in London in 2014.

Past recipients of the Leo Award include Michael GovanDimitris DaskalopoulosRoy and Dorothy LichtensteinMiuccia Prada, and Dasha Zhukova.

ICI’s 2016 Independent Vision Curatorial Award Nominees

Posted on August 25, 2016

Established in 2010 as an initiative of the Gerrit Lansing Education Fund, the Independent Vision Curatorial Award reflects ICI’s commitment to supporting international curators early in their careers who have shown exceptional creativity and prescience in their exhibition-making, research, and related writing. The award, including a $3,000 stipend towards a new project, is given every two years to an early or mid-career curator to support their independent practice through ICI, and give them a platform to pursue and publish their research online. The Independent Vision Curatorial Award is significant in that it is one of the very few awards in the world to recognize rising curatorial talent.

Past recipients of the award are Doryun Chong (2010), Chief Curator at M+, Hong Kong; Nav Haq (2012), recently appointed curator of the 2017 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, & Jay Sanders (2012), Curator and Curator of Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York – both selected for the Award by Hans Ulrich Obrist; and Eva Barois De Caevel (2014), an independent curator who earlier this year collaborated on the 37th EVA International, Ireland Biennial of Contemporary Art, Limerick, selected by Nancy Spector.

This year we reached out to 12 international curators and ICI collaborators have each nominated one emerging or mid-career curator for the award. From these nominations, Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, will select and present this year’s award at the ICI Annual Benefit & Auction on October 26, 2016.

The 2016 Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Curatorial Award Nominating Committee is comprised of: Omar Berrada, Writer, translator, and curator; Joselina Cruz, Director and Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Manila; Elvira Dyangani Ose, Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London, independent curator and member of the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada; Ruth Estévez, Director & Curator, Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles; Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, Independent curators and academics, Co-founders of the multidisciplinary curatorial platform Art Reoriented, Munich and New York; Julieta González, Chief Curator / Interim Director, Museo Jumex, Mexico and Adjunct Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Brazil; Susan Hapgood, Executive Director, International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, Executive Co-Directors of the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Lucía Sanromán, Director of Visual Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Sally Tallant, Director, Liverpool Biennial; Emiliano Valdés, Chief Curator, Museum of Modern Art, Medellín; and Jochen Volz, Curator of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo 2016, Brazil.


The 2016 Independent Vision Curatorial Award Nominees are
:
• Amanda Abi Khalil: Independent curator and Founder, Temporary Art Platform; Beirut, Lebanon.
• Elisé Atangana: Independent curator and producer; Curator, Seven Hills, Kampala Art Biennale 2016, Uganda; Cameroon and France.
• Rashida Bumbray: Independent curator and choreographer; Senior Program Manager, the Arts Exchange, Open Society Foundations; New York, USA.
• Diana Campbell Betancourt: Chief Curator Dhaka Art Summit and Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Bellas Artes Project, Bagac; The Philippines.
• José Esparza Chong Cuy: Pamela Alper Associate Curator, MCA Chicago; Chicago, USA.
• Sabel Gavaldon: Independent curator; London, UK.
• Candice Hopkins: Independent curator and writer; Albuquerque, USA.
• Miguel A. Lopez: Chief Curator, TEOR/éTica; San José, Costa Rica; Co-founder, Bisagra, Lima, Perú.
• Camila Marambio: Independent curator; Tierra del Fuego, Chile.
• Louise O’Kelly: Founding Director, Block Universe Performance Art Festival; London, UK.
• Fatos Ustek: Independent curator and writer; London, UK.
• Vivian Ziherl: Curator, Jerusalem Show VII Before and After Origins (2016) and Founder, Frontier Imaginaries; Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Amanda Abi Khalil: Independent curator & Founder of Temporary Art Platform
Based in Beirut, Amanda Abi Khalil focuses her curatorial projects on socially engaged practices, public spaces and the contextual ways of making art and curating in Lebanon. Concerned with a sociological reading of the art scene in Beirut and interested in cultural policy, she has been particularly devoted to commissioning local artists to explore the possibilities of engaging social, aesthetical or political dialogues in different contexts that are on the margin of the art world.

Her practice as an exhibition-maker in and outside Lebanon tackles various themes including narrative and non-narrative practices in the MENA region, the moving image, anachronisms in image making, the white cube ideology of the gallery space while always critically rethinking the exhibition format through the methods she employs and the scenography. She also curates public interventions and artworks that aim to challenge the commonalities of public art.

Her most recent collective exhibitions include Kurz/Dust at the Center for Contemporary Arts Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, an international exhibition including artists whose works enter into interaction with their surrounding environment. The project comprised an exhibition, a series of site-specific commissions, artist residencies, an archive-auditorium and also a series of commissioned performances, discussions and film screenings. This organic structure was intended to initiate reflection and the experiencing of everyday coexistence with matter in different geopolitical contexts.

She is the founder of Temporary Art Platform, a curatorial platform that aims to shift artistic and curatorial discourse towards social and contextual concerns in Lebanon through residencies, research projects and commissions. Her most recent curatorial project with TAP was a series of twelve art interventions for four daily Lebanese newspapers that took place between April and June 2016.

Abi Khalil lectures in curating and sociology of arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) and at the Saint Joseph University (USJ) in Beirut and is an audience outreach consultant for the Association for the Promotion and the Exhibition of Arts in Lebanon.

Elise Atangana by Eva Bartussek

Élise Atangana: Independent curator and producer; Curator, Seven Hills, Kampala Art Biennale 2016, Uganda
Élise Atangana situates her work between curating and exhibition production. From Cameroon and based in Paris, she envisions art as individual and collective practice.

At the end of 2015, she was in residence at Delfina Foundation in London in the context of their research project on “Public Domain”. This allowed her to further expand her research on the links between physical and virtual mobilities (movement, representation, practice), and consider their relation with contemporary art practice. How can space be activated by the physical and virtual movement of individuals? How is artistic practice influenced by these new mobilities? How does the relation to the body find an articulation with the modulation of the perception of space born out of virtuality, and what are the social and political implications?

In 2015, the exhibition Entry Prohibited to Foreigners, held at the Havremagasinet in Sweden, presented the work of 11 international artists, all of whom helped the audience put in perspective the diversity of mobilities today. Together with Abdelkader Damani and Smooth Ugochuckwu Nzewi, Elise Atangana was co-curator of Producing the Common, the international exhibition of the 11th Dakar Biennale in 2014. She has collaborated with curator Elvira Dyangani Ose on the Lumumbashi Biennale – Rencontres Picha 2012/2013, which was entitled Enthusiasm. In 2011, she became a founding member of the curatorial and research platform ‘On the Roof’, with Yves Chatap and Caroline Hancock, later joined by Vanessa Desclaux. Between 2004 and 2009, she worked with Simon Njami on several exhibition projects, including Check List Luanda Pop at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, a selection of artists from Africa Remix in the 9th Havana Biennale in 2006, and the Camouflage Art Center in Brussels in 2005. Atangana was a jury member for the 6th Artes Mundi Prize (2014) and for the shortlist of Artes Mundi 7 (2015). She is a member of the acquisitions board of Nord-Pas de Calais Regional Fund of Contemporary Art and part of the Global Mobilities Futures Network (GMF).

Rashida Bumbray Leslie Hewitt Rashida Bumbray: Independent curator and choreographer; Senior Program Manager, the Arts Exchange, Open Society Foundations
In 2001, Bumbray began her curatorial career at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she coordinated major exhibitions, including Energy Experimentation: African-American Artists 1964-1980 with Kellie Jones. As Associate Curator at The Kitchen, Bumbray organized critically acclaimed exhibitions and commissions by Leslie Hewitt, Simone Leigh, Adam Pendleton, Mai-Thu Perret and Elodie Pong, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Sanford Biggers, Marc Cary, Kyle Abraham, and Camille A. Brown, among many others. In 2014, Bumbray was a Facilitator for “A History of Contemporary Art in Dakar in Five Weeks” at Àsìkò 4th CCA, Lagos International ArtProgramme in Dakar. She was guest curator of Creative Time’s public art exhibition Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn (2014), which was named among Holland Cotter’s Notable Art Events of 2014 (New York Times). Bumbray served as Director of Artistic Affairs at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C from 2014-2015.  She sits on the board of directors of Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, and has been a consultant to the Surdna and Creative Capital foundations.

Bumbray is an accomplished choreographer. Her work has been presented by SummerStage, Harlem Stage, Caribbean Cultural Center, Project Row Houses, and Weeksville Heritage Center. She was nominated for the Bessie Award (New York Dance & Performance Awards) for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer in 2014. Bumbray’s Run Mary Run was on The New York Times’ list of Best Concerts for 2012 and featured in Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran’s BLEED at the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

A graduate of Oberlin College, Bumbray received an MA in Africana Studies from New York University.

Diana Betancourt Shumon Ahmed Diana Campbell Betancourt: Artistic Director of Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka and Bellas Artes Project, Bagac; Chief Curator Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka
Over the past four years Betancourt has developed the Dhaka Art Summit to be the world’s leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, and developed a new philanthropic platform to shift the discourse away from an Indo-centric one by bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers from across South Asia and through a largely commission based model where new work and exhibitions are born in Bangladesh. She has curated numerous solo projects with artists such as Haroon Mirza, Simryn Gill, Tino Sehgal, Lynda Benglis, Shilpa Gupta, Shahzia Sikander, Naeem Mohaiemen, Runa Islam, Shumon Ahmed, Pawel Althamer, Asim Waqif, and Raqs Media Collective as well as group exhibitions such as Rewind (with Amara Antilla, Sabih Ahmed, and Beth Citron) and Mining Warm Data, and initiated a free, alternative education program called Samdani Seminars which bridges the gaps in curriculum between the various art schools in Dhaka with international guest faculty. She chairs the board of the Mumbai Art Room, has been a research fellow at the Henry Moore Institute and the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, and has collaborated with sculpture parks including Yorkshire Sculpture Park, de Cordova, and Wanas Konst on new commissions of Indian sculpture.

Formerly based in Mumbai for six years, beyond furthering and facilitating inter-regional South Asia dialog through her exhibitions and public programs, Betancourt has a keen interest in inter-Asia dialogs and was a resident researcher at the Fukuoka Asian Art in 2016 and co-curated the Mumbai City Pavilion for the 9th Shanghai Biennial in 2012 and her studies at Princeton included a concentration in Chinese Language and Culture. She has consulted the New Museum and MCA Chicago and many other leading institutions on their inclusion of South Asia in their exhibitions programs and has presented her research as part of MoMA’s C-MAP initiative. She is co-editing a reader of the 2016 Dhaka Art Summit that will soon be released by Mousse publishing, and guest edited Take on Art’s Sculpture issue in 2013.

Jose Esparza

José Esparza Chong Cuy: Pamela Alper Associate Curator, MCA Chicago
José Esparza Chong Cuy works as a curator but was trained as an architect. His approach to curatorial practice is deeply informed by the built environment—a site he thinks of as the most complex exhibition, where desires are showcased individually but perform collectively as a system. He makes sense of culture through the cities that communities inhabit: from the rational gridded cities of New York or Chicago, to the chaotic organization of Mexico City or Sao Paulo. Context is important for him.

He was recently appointed the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and is currently researching the history of the New Bauhaus, an experimental pedagogical project that found in Chicago a fertile ground where modernist ideas and ideals took new forms. Prior to his arrival to the MCA Chicago, Esparza was Associate Curator and head of Research and Public Programs at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, where amongst other projects he launched an large-scale performance program presenting the work of Pedro Reyes and Alexandra Bachzetsis, as well as a series of ongoing exhibitions titled Pasajeros (Passengers), which study the passing of important, yet overlooked, artistic figures through Mexico who left a deep imprint in the local artistic community. Polish experimental theater director Jerzy Grotowski, who was following a similar path to that of Antonin Artaud in the Sierra Tarahumara, inaugurated the series. Los Angeles-based architecture critic Esther McCoy, who spent time in Cuernavaca and befriended the influential yet under recognized designer Clara Porset, will be next.

In addition to working for cultural institutions, he also maintains an active independent curatorial practice and is currently developing a public art project titled Mexico 68 that looks into the residual infrastructure of the infamous 1968 Olympics that took place in Mexico City with the support of the Graham Foundation. Participants include Jill Magid, Jorge Otero Pailos, Tania Pérez Córdova, and Francesco Pedraglio.

Sabel Gavaldon, 2016 - Photo by Eva Fabregas

Sabel Gavaldon: Independent curator
Sabel Gavaldon makes exhibitions, writes and thinks through artworks. His last exhibition took place in a derelict factory in the outskirts of Barcelona, and playfully employed fiction to place the viewer before the remains of an unknown material culture, reminiscent of those prehistoric monuments that Robert Smithson once described in a tour of his suburban hometown of Passaic. Collapsing past, present, and future, the exhibition invited the audience to consider vast geological timescales as well as microscopic life forms whose scale of experience is unimaginable to the human mind.

Gavaldon is interested in the material and semiotic contingencies of the exhibition format. He approaches curating as a practice that resists specialization and makes it possible to articulate disparate perspectives, bodies of knowledge and registers of experience, multiplying our universe through the worlds of others.

In 2013, he initiated A Museum of Gesture, an ongoing project that explores gesture as a form of resistance, looking at the performative strategies and expressive codes invented by minorities and subordinate groups. Working from an understanding of the body as a living political archive, the project excavates just a handful of these minor histories, by engaging with phenomena such as the House and Ballroom culture in NYC. More recently, this research has extended into a new project with curator Manuel Segade, which invokes the real and imagined legacies of black radical performance. The upcoming exhibition will take place in the autumn of 2017 at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid.

Gavaldon writes texts and delivers talks encompassing topics that range from squid language to psychedelics, from Zeno’s paradoxes to the physics of cartoons, and from cheese making to the manifold ways in which our life is entangled with the biocultural histories of other species living among us. His talks have been hosted by organisations including the Camden Arts Centre, Chisenhale Gallery, Architectural Association, Cittadellarte–Fondazione Pistoletto, Lugar a Dudas, and Tenderpixel.

Gavaldon was born in Barcelona, and currently lives in London.

Candice Hopkins Jason S. Ordaz

Candice Hopkins: Independent Curator and writer
Candice Hopkins, a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation in Yukon, Canada, is an independent curator and writer now based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At present she is Curatorial Advisor for documenta 14, which will open in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017. Her writings on history, Indigenous art, and vernacular architecture have been published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, Revolver Press, New York University, The Fillip Review, Canadian Art Magazine and the National Museum of the American Indian, among others. Recent essays and presentations include “Outlawed Social Life” for the documenta 14 edited South as a State of Mind and Sounding the Margins: A Choir of Minor Voices at Small Projects, Tromsø, Norway. She has lectured widely including at the Witte de With, Tate Modern, Dak’Art Biennale, Artists Space, Tate Britain and the University of British Columbia. In 2012 she presented a keynote lecture on the topic of the “sovereign imagination” for dOCUMENTA(13) together with Hetti Perkins. Hopkins is presently engaged as a researcher with Dr. Dylan Robinson on the multi-year project, Sensate Sovereignties on Indigenous sound and public art practices.

Hopkins’ collaborative curatorial projects include Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, the National Gallery of Canada’s largest survey of recent Indigenous art, co-curated with Greg Hill and Christine Lalonde and Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, a multi-venue exhibition in Winnipeg, Canada on Indigenous futurisms co-curated with Steven Loft, Lee-Ann Martin and Jenny Western. While at Western Front she organized the exhibitions Before the Internet: Networks and Art (with Peter Courtmanche); The F Word (on feminism) with Alissa Firth-Eagland; Kits for an Encounter (with Marisa Jahn); Jimmie Durham: Knew Urk (with Robert Blackson), as well as the first solo exhibition of Paul Chan in Canada. In 2014 she was part of the curatorial team of the SITE Santa Fe biennial, Unsettled Landscapes, together with Lucía Sanromán, Irene Hoffman, and Janet Dees, and returned in 2016 as Managing Curator of SITElines.2016 biennial, much wider than a line. In 2015 she received the prestigious Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Miguel Lopez Photo Daniela Morales Miguel A. Lopez: Chief Curator, TEOR/éTica (San José, Costa Rica); Co-founder, Bisagra (Lima, Perú)
Miguel A. López is a writer, researcher, and Chief Curator of TEOR/éTica in San Jose, Costa Rica. His work investigates collaborative dynamics and transformations in the understanding of and engagement with politics in Latin America in recent decades. His work also focuses on feminist and queer re-articulations of history from a Southern perspective. He is a founding member of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur, an international platform active since 2007 that seeks different possibilities in writing, archiving, thinking, positioning, exhibiting and politically historicizing the artistic-political practices that have taken place in Latin America since 1960s.

Recent curatorial projects include: A Kingdom of Hours (co-curated with Robert Leckie) at Gasworks, London (2016); TeresaBurga. Structures of Air (co-curated with Agustín Perez Rubio) at MALBA, Buenos Aires (2015); the section ‘God is Queer’ for the 31 Bienal de São Paulo (2014); A Wandering Body. Sergio Zevallos and the Grupo Chaclacayo, 1982-1994 at the Lima Art Museum (2013) and Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2014); and Losing Human Form. Aseismic image of the 1980s in Latin America (co-curated with Red Conceptualismos del Sur) at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Lima Art Museum, and MUNTREF in Buenos Aires (2012-2014).

Since 2012 he has been part of the curatorial team of Contemporary Art Acquisitions Committee at the Lima Art Museum. He is a founding member of Bisagra, a contemporary art platform active since 2014 in Lima, which is focused on developing experimental public programs and other formats for exhibition making.

Camila Marambio Photo Benjamin Echazarreta

Camila Marambio: Independent curator
Camila Marambio is director of Ensayos, a nomadic research program that focuses on ecological issues in Tierra del Fuego through experimental interdisiciplinary practices.  She founded the program in 2010 in order to integrate artists and humanities scholars into the existing scientific research teams in the region, working in partnership with Wildlife Conservation Society’s Karukinka Natural Park.  Ensayos considers Tierra del Fuego and its climate and cultural concerns as a laboratory where issues of global importance are considered at a hyper-local level. Work from Ensayos has been represented in exhibitions and performances at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; the Institute for Art and Olfaction, Los Angeles; BHQFU, New York; Puerto de Ideas, Valparaíso; Festival Cielos del Infinito, Puerto Williams, CL; Kurant, Tromsø, NO; and Psi #22, Melbourne, AU.

Marambio received an M.A. in Modern Art: Critical Studies at Columbia University and a Master of Experiments in Art and Politics at Science Po in Paris; attended the Curatorial Programme at de Appel Arts Center in Amsterdam; and has been curator-in-residence at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris and Gertrude Contemporary in Australia.  She was Chief Curator at Matucana 100 in Santiago, and previously Assistant Curator at Exit Art in New York City. Currently she resides in Melbourne, Australia were she is a PhD Candidate in Curatorial Practice at MADA.

 

Louise O'Kelly ©Louise Greidinger midsize

Louise O’Kelly: Founding Director of Block Universe, Performance Art Festival, London
Louise O’Kelly is an independent curator and arts professional based in London. In 2015 she founded Block Universe, London’s first performance art festival that takes place across major institutions and unique off-site spaces throughout the city annually.

Through Block Universe, O’Kelly curates a program of performances that cross boundaries between visual arts, music and dance, creating a high-profile platform to raise the visibility of a new generation of artists. Operating under a single curatorial vision, O’Kelly explores a series of interlinking themes with each edition of the festival, commissioning and producing works by UK-based and international artists. June 2017 will bring the third edition of the festival.

Previous projects have focused on performance and the live encounter, manifesting mostly as one-off collaborative, multidisciplinary events in partnership with institutions, artist-run spaces and collectives. Underlining her curatorial practice is a keen interest in the relationship of cultural and embodied memory in performance, and the role of choreography and dance in the visual arts. This research furthers a line of inquiry that began with the opportunity to work with a number of historic artists estates working with performance and participation such as Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta, and Hannah Wilke amongst others and continued in postgraduate studies. O’Kelly holds a MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, London.

O’Kelly regularly speaks on panels in relation to performance and co-hosts an ongoing talk series on contemporary art for the Soho House Group. O’Kelly is also Artforum’s Representative for the United Kingdom and Ireland.

FatosUstek_photocredit_JoshMeeks-RayvonWilliams

Fatos Ustek: Independent curator & writer
Based in London, Fatos Ustek was recently appointed curator of Art Night 2017, with artistic direction of Whitechapel Gallery in association with Unlimited Productions. She is currently editing the fig-2 publication, that commemorates 50 projects in 50 consecutive weeks that she curated in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Formerly, Ustek acted as associate curator for the 10th Gwangju Biennial, South Korea.  Forthcoming, she will guest lecture on contemporary curating practices at the Estonian Contemporary Art Development Centre in Tallinn, and speak at the 5th para-curatorial seminar series at the Times Museum in Guangzhou; as well as jury for the sculpture section at the 2017 Arte Laguna Art Prize, Venice. Ustek is on the Block Universe Advisory Board; member of AICA UK, an ICI Alumni, and part of the Curators Network. Other curated projects include an opera in five acts at DRAF, London as well as an exhibition trilogy entitled Now Expanded that took place at Kunstfabrik, Berlin; Tent, Rotterdam and DRAF, London.

She contributes regularly to international art magazines and have edited and authored numerous publications and exhibition catalogues.  Acting as a founding editor of Nowiswere Contemporary Art Magazine between 2008-2012, Ustek was also the editor of Unexpected Encounters Situations of Contemporary Art and Architecture (Turkish Only, 2012; English Only, upcoming) published by Zorlu Centre, Istanbul.  She is also the author of Book of Confusions, 2012, published by Rossi&Rossi, London.

In 2008, Ustek received her M.A. at the Contemporary Art Theory Department at Goldsmiths College London.  She also holds a BA in Mathematics from Bogazici University, Istanbul, where she additionally completed a degree in Film Studies.

Vivian Ziherl

Vivian Ziherl: Curator, Jerusalem Show VIII Before and After Origins; Founder, Frontier Imaginaries; PIR researcher, If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution; Co-founder, Landings art and research platform with Natasha Ginwala; Graduate, de Appel Curatorial Programme.
Raised in Brisbane, Australia and working from Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 2015 Vivian Ziherl established the roving art and research platform Frontier Imaginaries, with the support of the Institute of Modern Art Curatorial Fellowship. The project launched in 2016 across both the Institute of Modern Art and QUT Art Museum in Brisbane, and with a satellite presentation at the Australian Cinémathèque. Its second edition occurs under the guise of Jerusalem Show VIII, on the invitation of Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art and as part of the 3rd Qalandiya International. A future edition will take place in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum in 2018.

At base Frontier Imaginaries is an experiment. It explores a new form of para-institution in the arts; one that responds to both the new possibilities for connection, and the rising states of isolation that mark the global era. Its driving task is to work trans-locally in order to map the ongoing significance of the frontier formation, and in so doing to challenge its grip.

Frontier Imaginaries is interested in a kind of curatorial ‘realpolitik’. It is less interested in a play of signifiers within a supposedly neutral space than in what cultural resources are to hand (funds, status, accessibility, mobility, visibility) and of what is to be done with them. The project learns form 1980s and ‘90s art debates in Australia over ‘appropriation’ and the misguided or wrong-minded effort to insert Aboriginal art into a Western cannon through visual cues alone. As aesthetic work, Frontier Imaginaries explores a notion of frontier formalism. It approaches form in a sense that resolutely encompasses socio-economic and historically located constellations.

 

Join us and meet the winner at the 2016 Annual Benefit & Auction on Wednesday, October 26, 2016. To stay updated on this event or for ticket inquiries contact Jenn Hyland at jenn@curatorsintl.org.

2016 Leo Award created by Tony Matelli

 2016 Leo Award created by Tony Matelli

Posted on October 21, 2016

This year’s Leo Award was created by New York-based artist, Tony Matelli.  The award will be presented to this year’s honoree, Marian Goodman, during ICI’s Annual Benefit and Auction on October 26, 2016.

Developed out of Matelli’s recent Garden series, this year’s Leo displays an aged head of cast concrete delicately crowned by a triad of seemingly ripe strawberries.  Cast in bronze and meticulously painted, these eternally ripe fruits contrast pointedly with their carefully weathered base. This disjunctive pairing belies the work’s high production, creating a seamless experience of both accelerated and arrested time.

Evoking both an accumulated history and a feeling of immediacy, this year’s Leo mirrors Marian Goodman’s steadfast and continuing commitment to artists and contemporary art: deeply grounded, but ever-present.

Tony Matelli was born in Chicago, and lives and works in New York. His upcoming exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Museum in Ridgefield opens in November 2016. He is represented by Marlborough Gallery, New York.

To coincide with this year’s Annual Benefit & Auction, Matelli has also created a Limited Edition for ICI, which will launch at NADA Miami Beach in December 2016.

Interview with Merve Elveren, ICI’s 2018 Curatorial Vision Awardee

Merve Elveren

Posted on March 18, 2019

Interview with Merve Elveren, ICI’s 2018 Curatorial Vision Awardee
by Amanda Parmer,
ICI’s Director of Programs

Amanda: I’d love it if we could begin by talking about the relationship between solo and group exhibitions in your work at SALT these past seven years.

Merve: Each exhibition builds on positions and there is no pre-set common denominator; therefore, it is quite difficult to generalize the relationship between them. However, one clear distinction is that the group exhibitions that I’ve worked on over the past seven years mainly focused on archives –from periodicals to photographs, video clips to tv commercials– and recordings. While group and solo exhibitions have particular methodologies, they all have extensive research periods and are collaborative in nature.

Amanda: When you say that there is a consistent research methodology, could you explain what that looks like for you?

Merve: As the original material changes from artworks to archives, adaptability of proposals and strategies become all the more important, especially due to limitations determined by the ephemerality of certain archives or state restrictions. The research phase of each exhibition begins with a set of questions, rather than the expectation of a specific outcome, which in turn necessitates a holistic yet detail-oriented grasp of the nature of the material–the crux and relevance of the subject-matter that will eventually trigger the format. For instance, How did we get here, a project focused on temporary manifestations of collectivism in the 1980s post-coup d’état period, my colleague Erman Ata Uncu and I interviewed more than one hundred people (including academicians, journalists, activists, writers, architects, film directors, influential actors of the period) and went through their personal archives. The project was shaped around the interconnected stories and archives of second-wave feminists, anti-militarists, the green movement, LGBTQI activists, and human rights defenders; and re-introduced various alternative tactics to survive in oppressive environments. On the other hand, in the more recent project Continuity Error, the first comprehensive survey of Aydan Murtezaoğlu and Bülent Şangar, who were prominent figures in shaping the emerging contemporary art scene in 1990s’ Turkey, I worked closely with them for over two years, to discuss how changes in the political climate influenced their artistic practice. The curatorial choices concerning the exhibition were also an outcome of our long discussions. I can give you more examples but the research is really the key, the core ingredient, in these projects, and my motivation was not only to emphasize the importance of the work/or the recording in the past but also to address their relevance today.

Amanda: It would be helpful to know more about this key element. How do you determine how something is resonating with the contemporary moment in your work?

Merve: As I briefly mentioned above, at SALT, the research outcomes are not predetermined even in format. It can be an exhibition, a publication, a web-based platform or a public talk program, –sometimes, all or a few of the above. This provides certain flexibility to rethink and to reassess the relevance of the findings or developing lines of thought as a whole. The final content of the project is only locked down in the last three months as it cannot be detached from the local discussions. How the content resonates in the contemporary political context and how it responds to the moment remain the crucial concern throughout.

Amanda: Those last three months must be pretty tight!

Merve: Definitely. But it is also the most exciting part of it, as the conversations, collaborative processes, and the new findings finally converge.

Amanda: It’s interesting what you’re saying about how you locate these histories and then excite them again by juxtaposing different materials and having these conversations. Are there ways you can talk about locating physical material, artifacts and representations of these experiences that supplement the conversations and underpin or support the kind of exchanges you’re having that are maybe not part of the exchange itself?

Merve: This is the reason why I try to expand my initial research by consulting as many individuals as possible. The conversations, interviews, and sharing of references during the research period open up new perspectives and lead me to the personal archives, and each meeting somehow complements one another. The kind of research-heavy exhibitions I work on mainly entails the introduction of these at-risk/closed archives to the public, to preserve their memory, and to propose narratives alternative to the dominant state idiom. The exhibition itself, of course, does not hide that this act of sharing and contestation has very specific motivations, and there are certain critical moments/examples that I like to point out. However, this framework remains far from being overdetermining as the unfinished nature of the exhibition also accommodates new readings. The viewer or the user of the exhibition and the archive can introduce a new set of questions and continue working on these discussions.

Amanda: You’re talking very much about de-centering yourself and your authorial role within curating these projects. Could you talk a little bit about this and what you think is making this particular to the way that you handle these projects?

Merve: Shifting the authorship, working on the curatorial decisions with artists, educators, researchers, designers, and many others, initiated new research-based dialogues. The outcomes of the projects are primarily shaped by these relationships. Rather than focusing on a singular narrative, these projects created frictions, stimulated discussions, and more importantly responded to active debates of today.

Amanda: Your work seems to always attend to the local context that it’s presented in. I am wondering if that is something that you see shifting in the future. Could you talk a little bit about the importance of how you’re determining and understanding what your viewership is?

Merve: You are right until now I have strictly worked with the local context. But it’s not because I have the preconception that the local context is unique and fundamentally different from other places. In fact, I find it inspiring when I see, through the juxtaposition of the local with the non-local, that different actions and movements and initiatives form organic parallels in different parts of the world, that we are still somehow interconnected. I am also very excited to work in this direction, teasing out such correspondences. As for viewership, I don’t start the projects by defining the viewer. But it’s never the local audience on my mind when I am working towards a project.

Amanda: It’s interesting that you’re saying that you don’t think so much about the viewership, but that you put so much weight on trusting the viewership.

Merve: I’m not interested in attracting large numbers of visitors or appealing to a specific viewership, but I remain thoroughly interested and invested in what the audience, the user gets out of an exhibition and what can they do with it, how research can live outside of the exhibition space?

Birds of Paradise by Cristina Molina

 Birds of Paradise by Cristina Molina

Posted on March 22, 2019

Image: Cristina Molina, Birds of Paradise, 2016. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of Lily P. Brooks Collection.

Birds of Paradise (2016), is the first installation of a new initiative that links together our international programs by inviting a curator to connect us with an artist in the cities where we hold our Curatorial Intensives. This spring we invited Katie Pfohl to put us in conversation with an artist and she selected Cristina Molina. Molina’s Birds of Paradise, which appears on the cover of this brochure, also hangs in our New York space through the summer. The work is resonant with the themes of accessibility and inclusivity; indigeneity as rootedness in place; the modern museum in the global era; and gender, race, and representation.

“As part of her recent series The Matriarchs, the New Orleans based artist Cristina Molina collaborated with all of the women in her family to create an evocative series of photographs that combine tropical flora and fauna with fragments of the female body. Set in the subtropics, works in this series such as Birds of Paradise emphasize and affirm the generative power of women’s voices within an increasingly fragile and threatened landscape. Referencing the Dutch vanitas tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries, The Matriarchs contemplates the relationship between landscape, lineage and loss, while at the same time looking to women as culture bearers who offer alternate ways of relating to our environment, and to each other. Spanning video, installation, performance, photography and textile design, Molina’s work often privileges female protagonists to explore themes related to culture, heritage and personal mythology, and how they can work in concert with the natural environment.”

Katie Pfohl, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, faculty in the 2019 Curatorial Intensive, New Orleans.

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PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT: INSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY WITH UNBAG

Posted on March 25, 2019

PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT: HUMBOLDT’S PARROT

PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT: COMRADESHIP BOOK LAUNCH AND E-FLUX

PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT: COMRADESHIP READING GROUP, FEB 19

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PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT: CURRICULUM

do it (in school)

 do it (in school)

Posted on March 27, 2019

Independent Curators International (ICI), in partnership with Studio in a School NYC, presents do it (in school), a new approach to art education based on the long-running exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, do it.

A new version of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s exhibition do it, conceived as a curriculum for high-school students

Featuring instructions by: Etel Adnan, Uri Aran, Yto Barrada, Robert Barry, Jérôme Bel, Bernadette Corporation, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Jimmie Durham, Cao Fei, Claire Fontaine, William Forsythe, Simryn Gill, Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster, Joseph Grigley, Shilpa Gupta, Anna Halprin, NS Harsha, Madeline Hollander, Jonathan Horowitz, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Aaron Koblin, Koo Jeong-A, Bertrand Lavier, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sol LeWitt, Lucy R. Lippard, David Lynch, Jonas Mekas, Annette Messager, Eileen Myles, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Albert Oehlen, Precious Okoyomon, Yoko Ono, Füsun Onur, Clifford Owens, ThaoNguyen Phan, Cesare Pietroiusti, Adrian Piper, Raqs Media Collective, Lillian F. Schwartz, Hassan Sharif, Jim Shaw, Shimabuku, Rikrit Tiravanija, Carrie Mae Weems, Erwin Wurm, and more.

Exhibition on view:
Hunter East Harlem Gallery, 2180 3rd Avenue at 119th Street, NYC
April 12 to June 1, 2019

In 1993, Obrist together with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, conceived do it, an exhibition based entirely on artists’ instructions, which could be followed to create temporary art works for the duration of a show. do it has challenged traditional exhibition formats, questioned authorship, and championed art’s ability to exist beyond a single gallery space. Since do it began, many new versions have appeared, including do it (museum) and do it (home) produced by ICI in 1997. Over 26 years, do it has grown from 12 to over 400 sets of artists’ instructions, and has been shown in more than 150 art centers in over 15 countries.

Building on this history, do it (in school) is the latest version of do it, a selection of instructions that form a study-based curriculum for high school students.

Curated by Obrist and produced by ICI in partnership with Studio in a School NYC, do it (in school) represents a new take on art education, focused on contemporary practice and geared towards critical thinking and creative experience through hands-on workshops. The curriculum is a solid base for learning about conceptual art and some of the most influential art practices of this century. Students learn about contemporary artists from around the world, generating artworks that respond to their personal experience as they interpret the work themselves.

Over the past six months Studio in a School NYC adopted do it (in school) in their ongoing curriculum with three New York City high schools: Art and Design High School, Manhattan; Fordham High School for the Arts, Bronx; and Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School, Queens.

Capping this first implementation of do it (in school), an exhibition at Hunter East Harlem Gallery will present a selection of works realized by students as a result of the Studio in a School NYC programs, alongside documentation of the students’ process of interpretation of the artists’ written scores. This collaboration with Hunter College adds to do it (in school) a unique connection between high schools and a city university, as high-schoolers become active in the college art gallery program. The exhibition will open with a reception on Friday, April 12, 4–8pm, at Hunter East Harlem Gallery, 2180 3rd Avenue, and be on view through June 1, 2019.

do it (in school) is made possible with the generous collaboration of Uri Aran, and by ICI’s Board of Trustees, ICI’s Leadership Council and the Jeanne and Dennis Masel Foundation, and additional gifts to ICI’s Access Fund, as well as by the generous support of individuals and foundations that support Studio in a School NYC’s New York City Schools Program.

About the Curator:
Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and Senior Artistic Advisor of The Shed in New York. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows. Obrist’s recent publications include Mondialité, Somewhere Totally Else, Ways of Curating, The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar, and Lives of The Artists, Lives of The Architects.

About Studio in a School NYC:
Since 1977, Studio in a School NYC has nurtured the creativity and growth of over one million students through quality visual arts instruction taught by professional artists. Studio’s New York City Schools Program engages over 30,000 students in Pre-K through high school in all five boroughs each year, while the national Studio Institute focuses on research and dissemination of best practices in visual arts education as well as college and career readiness for teens and young adults.

About Hunter East Harlem Gallery
Hunter East Harlem Gallery is a multidisciplinary space for art exhibitions and socially minded projects. Located on the ground floor of Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work, the gallery presents exhibitions and public events that foster academic collaborations at Hunter College while addressing subjects relevant to the East Harlem community and greater New York City. The gallery seeks to initiate partnerships with publicly oriented organizations and focuses on showcasing artists who are engaging in social practice, public interventions, community projects, and alternative forms of public art. Since its inception in 2011, all exhibitions and programs at Hunter East Harlem Gallery are free and open to the public.

Press Contacts:

Bessie Zhu, Independent Curators International (ICI)
bessie@curatorsintl.org

Jonas Stigh, Studio in a School NYC (Studio)
jstigh@studioinaschool.org

Arden Sherman, Hunter East Harlem Gallery (HEHG)
huntereastharlem@gmail.com

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PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT: COMRADESHIP READING GROUP, MARCH 19

Posted on April 10, 2019

PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT: 2018 CI Bangkok: Public Symposium

Posted on April 15, 2019

PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT: Move Towards Her

PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT: COMRADESHIP READING GROUP, APRIL 23