Poka-Yio studied Fine Arts and Digital Arts in Athens. He has exhibited in Athens and internationally. He has been a member of ILIOS experimental music group (1991-1996), and is the director of A-Station, Athens Contemporary Art Center, since 1999. His articles appear in FUTURA review since 1997.
Visitors 2007
International Visitor Programme
Director and Curator, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland
Beatrix Ruf studied in Vienna, New York and Zürich. Since September 2001 she is the Director/Curator of the Kunsthalle Zürich. In 2006 she was curator of the Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London. Previously, she had been Director/Curator of the Kunsthaus Glarus, and between 1994 and 1998 curator at the Kunstmuseum of the Canton of Thurgau. Since 1995 she is curator of the Ringier collection. Since 1999 Board member of the Schweizerische Graphische Gesellschaft (SGG) and member of the Art commission of Swiss Re. Since 2003 she is also Associate Editor of the publishing house JRP/Ringier. She has organized exhibitions, has written essays and published catalogues on artists such as Jenny Holzer, Marina Abramovic, Peter Land, Liam Gillick, Urs Fischer, Emmanuelle Antille, Angela Bulloch, Ugo Rondinone, Richard Prince, Keith Tyson, Elmgreen&Dragset, Monica Bonvicini, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pierre Huyghe/Philippe Parreno: No Ghost just a Shell, Rodney Graham, Isa Genzken, Doug Aitken, Wilhelm Sasnal, de Rijke / de Rooij, Eva Rothschild, Rebecca Warren, Carol Bove, Oliver Payne&Nick Relph, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sean Landers, John Armleder, Catherine Sullivan, Daria Martin, Trisha Donnelly, Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Kelley Walker, Josh Smith, General Idea and many others.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is a writer, art historian and curator. Christov-Bakargiev was recently appointed Director of the 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2015). She has been the Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); Chief Curator at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (2002–2008), and its Director in 2009; Artistic Director of the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008) and Senior Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate, New York, NY, USA (1999–2001). The author of publications including Arte Povera (London: Phaidon Press, 1999), she has written extensively on such a movement and on the work of artists such as William Kentridge, Janet Cardiff, and Pierre Huyghe. She curated numerous exhibitions, including among others, ‘On Taking a Normal Situation and Retranslating it into Overlapping and Multiple Readings of Conditions Past and Present’, Antwerp, Belgium (1993), ‘The Moderns’, Rivoli-Turin, Italy (2003), and ‘Faces in the Crowd’, London, UK, and Turin (2004). She co-curated the first edition of the Turin Triennial (2005).
Director, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
Clive Kellner attended the first Johannesburg Biennale Trainee Curator Programme in South Africa and received further specialised training at De Appel in Amsterdam (1995-1996). He was appointed projects co-ordinator of the Africus Institute for Contemporary Art (AICA), Johannesburg (1996); assistant curator to both the South African national representation at the Sao Paulo Bienal (1996) and to the artistic director, Okwui Enwezor, of the Johannesburg Biennale (1997/98) and its monumental accompanying catalogue entitled Trade Routes: History and Geography. Work by 400 artists from 63 nations was displayed on this exhibition. He was also coordinator of the Rockefeller Foundation project: Ubuntu 2000 (1999); co-founder and director of a non-profit organisation, Camouflage in Parkwood, Johannesburg (1999-2001) that included a gallery, residency programme and an art journal; curator of a solo exhibition of Nigerian/UK artist Yinka Shonibare; and co-ordinator of the National Arts Council and British Council project: Connecting Flights (2000). Kellner has presented papers at various international conferences: Mostra Africana de Arte Contemporanea, Museum for Modern Art, Sao Paulo; (Trans) Africa, Palais d'Egmont, Brussels; Towards Transit, Zurich; Five Continents and One City, Mexico City; the Havana Bienal, Cuba; Post-apartheid contemporary art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy. He has also written for a variety of publications including Flash Art. International exhibitions of contemporary South African and African art that Kellner has curated include Vice Verses, Austria (1999); Foto Biennale (2000), Rotterdam; Five Continent and One City, Mexico (2000); Atmosphere Metropolitane: Johannesburg Johannesburg, Milan in Italy (2000); and Videobrasil (2000), São Paulo. He is on the Advisory Boards of the School of the Arts, Tshwane University, and the School of Fine Arts, University of Johannesburg, and has adjudicated a number of awards and competitions: Vita Art Awards; Seychelles Biennale; Brett Kebble Art Awards 2005; and Alexandria Biennale, Egypt (2005).
Curator, Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Renske Janssen is a curator and a writer. Since 2004 she is working as a curator at Witte de With, center for contemporary art, Rotterdam where she has a special interest in tensions and clashes in private and public space. She has curated several group exhibitions such as Tracer (2004) and Street: Behind the Cliché (2006) that dealt with related topics. With the concentration of solo exhibitions and publications she focuses on specific artistic positions dealing with the problematic status of the image and questions around representation in popular culture beginning with Mathias Poledna (2006), followed by the American artist Chloe Piene (scheduled for 2007 with publication). With an interest in the contemporary use of the personal and the emotive in moving imagery she's organising for 2007's International Film festival Rotterdam a selection of artists films under the title Depiction, Perversion, Repulsion, Obsession, Subversion that will focus on the critical use of cinematographic tools as sound and editing and - more general - with forms of manipulation. Among others, she published several texts and reviews in Dutch magazines Kunstbeeld and in the Rotterdam artist magazine Fucking Good Art and is a regular contributor of the Belgian music and cultural magazine Gonzo Circus.
She has a Masters title in Contemporary Art theory and Dutch Art policy from the University of Utrecht. From 2000-2003 she collaborated on For Real (2000), Display (2001) and Life in a Glass House (2002) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. At the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, she organized several solo exhibitions among others Bantar Gebang van De Rijke/De Rooij and Mindset of Saskia Olde Wolbers. She organized in collaboration with the Universiteit van Amsterdam several lectures about contemporary artistic practice and theory and was a freelance curator for Lost & Found, evenings for lost images in Amsterdam. From 2002 to 2004 she was a faithful assistant of Amsterdam based artist Germaine Kruip.
Anthony Huberman is Director and Chief Curator of The Wattis Institute in San Francisco. He was Founding Director of The Artist’s Institute in New York and a distinguished lecturer at Hunter College. Previously, he worked as chief curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, curator at SculptureCenter in New York, and director of education and public programmes at MoMA PS1 in New York. He has curated major solo exhibitions with artists such as Henrik Olesen, Laura Owens, Sam Lewitt, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Lutz Bacher, Gedi Sibony, Richard Artschwager, and Olivier Mosset, and has developed long-term research projects with artists such as David Hammons, Joan Jonas, Thomas Bayrle, Haim Steinbach, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jimmie Durham. He has published numerous articles in art periodicals, including Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, Afterall, and Mousse.
She received her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and her M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in 2004. As a graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies, she organized The Happy Workerand co-curated Framing the Real: Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection. At the Walker, she assisted with the exhibitions Andy Warhol/Supernova; Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005; Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat; Cameron Jamie; Heart of Darkness; Eva Hesse Drawing and is currently co-curator of the upcoming exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.
Marta Gili graduated in Philosophy and Education from Universitat de Barcelona. Between 1983 and 1988, she was part of the Primavera Fotogràfica de Barcelona Organizing Committee. Between 1991 and 2006, she was head of the Department of Photography and Visual Arts of the Fundació la Caixa. On October 2006, she was appointed director of the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Simultaneously, she was Artistic Director of Printemps de Septembre (visual arts festival) in Toulouse, for the 2002 and 2003 editions. She was member of the Acquisitions Committee for the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain of the French Ministry of Culture, between 1994 and 1997. Marta Gili has been the curator of a multitude of monographic exhibitions, such as those of Helen Chadwick, Tracey Moffat, Miguel Rio Branco, Lorna Simpson, Aernout Mik, Christer Stromholm, Gillian Wearing and Doug Aitken, amongst others. She has also headed thematic exhibitions, such as la Imatge Fràgil, Ficcions Documentades or Historias Animadas. She has contributed with articles in El País, El Mundo, ABC, Tema Celeste Beaux Arts Magazine, and she also collaborates monthly in EXIT magazine. Marta takes part in numerous seminaries and conferences, and teaches several postgraduate courses, both in Spain and abroad. Her texts have been published in several monographs of artists and in theory books published by Phaidon, Steidl, Gustavo Gili and the Fundació la Caixa.
Brian Sholis is Artforum.com Editor at Artforum. He has written for Artforum, Parkett, Afterall, Flash Art, Bookforum, Print, and the New York Press, among other periodicals; has contributed essays to publications accompanying exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and has contributed to books published by Taschen and Phaidon. He is the coeditor, with Noah Horowitz, of The Uncertain States of America Reader (Sternberg Press/Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art/Serpentine Gallery, 2006), has taught at New York University, and has been a visiting critic at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Parsons The New School for Design, New York.
Artist, Curator, Academic
Zhang Ga is a media artist, curator and a professor of communication arts. He has exhibited internationally including the Ars Electronica Center (Austria), Adelaide Art Festival (Australia), Dutch Electronic Art Festival (The Netherlands), Whitney Museum of American Art (US), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore) and Art Center Nabi (South Korea) among others, organized conferences and digital salons, written and lectured on new media art practice and criticism widely, and served on jury duties for media art grants. He is artistic director and curator of China International New Media Arts Exhibition 2008, a major cultural event presented by the National Art Museum of China during the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. He was the artistic director and curator of the Millennium Dialogue: Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium 2004, 2005 and 2006, His most recent curatorial projects include, Code:Blue, 3rd Beijing International New Media Art Exhibition, European Media Art Festival 2006 (guest curator), Container Culture - ISEA2006 / ZeroOne, a Global Festival of Art On the Edge (San Jose, US), New Directions from China (Basel, Switzerland). Prior to joining the New York Institute of Technology, he taught for many years at the MFA Design and Technology Department at Parsons School of Design. Zhang Ga studied at the University of Arts in Berlin (UDK) and holds an MFA from the Parsons School of Design in New York City. He is also a guest professor at the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing.
During his stay in Norway he will visit Bergen.
Shamim M. Momin was appointed Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004, and has been Branch Director and Curator of the Whitney Museum at Altria since October 2000. In addition to co-curating the 2004 Whitney Biennial, she has recently organized the solo exhibitions Mark Grotjahn (2006), Raymond Pettibon (2005-06), and Banks Violette: Untitled (2005), for which she also authored the catalogue. At the branch museum, Momin is responsible for organizing exhibitions and focusing on commissioning new work by emerging artists for both solo and thematic presentations, as well as writing essays for exhibition brochures, producing gallery talks, artists' talks, symposia, and panel discussions, and supervising the production of the annual Performance on 42nd Streetseries. Momin's exhibitions at Altria have included projects with artists such as Andrea Zittel, Rob Fischer, Sue de Beer, Luis Gispert, Katie Grinnan, Mark Bradford, Dario Robleto, Ellen Harvey, Do-Ho Suh, and E.V. Day.
As part of The Contemporary Series, which she organizes, Momin's latest exhibition for the Whitney was Terence Koh, which closed in May of 2007 and was accompanied by a catalogue co-authored by Momin. She oversaw the New York installation of Lorna Simpson, a touring exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts, which opened this past spring, for which she also contributed to the catalogue. She was also recently named co-curator for the upcoming 2008 Biennial exhibition.
Recent outside curatorial projects have included No Ordinary Sanctity (2005), a group exhibition at the Deutsch bank project space, Salzburg, as well as Will Boys be Boys?: Examining Adolescent Masculinity in Contemporary Art (2004-2007), organized in conjunction with Independent Curators International (travelling to six venues nationally). In addition to her Whitney exhibition publications, Momin has contributed essays to numerous other monographs, art periodicals, and exhibition catalogues, most recently as an invited author for the next in the Phaidon Cream series. Momin has participated on numerous juries and panels throughout USA. She has served as Visiting Professor for NYU's MFA Senior Seminar (Fall 2005) and is currently Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Art for Williams College 2007 Semester in New York program.
Adam Budak is currently curator for contemporary art at the Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria. He studied theatre at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and history and philosophy of art and architecture at the Central European University in Prague. He is a guest professor at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts - Flanders in Ghent and at the Theatre Institute of the Kunstuniversität in Graz. He has recently co-established the postgraduate studies programme in curatorial practice and theory at the Art History Institute of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Adam Budak has curated Architectures: Metastructures of Humanity, Morphic Strategies of Exposure, exhibition in the Polish Pavilion of the 9th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2004). He worked with acclaimed artists such as John Baldessari, Cerith Wyn Evans and Monika Sosnowska, and has curated a large number of international exhibitions. Recent projects includeProtections. This Is Not an Exhibition (together with Christine Peters) and Volksgarten. Politics of Belonging (cocurated with Katia Schurl and Peter Pakesch). Budak is one of the curators for Manifesta 7.
Diserens has graduated from Art history studies, University Paris, and Independent Study Program of the Whitney museum of American art. She was curator at IVAM, Valencia; freelance curator and founder of Carta Blanca Editions, Madrid/Paris; Director of the Museums of Marseille, and then of the Fine Arts Museum of Nantes; Currently she is Director of Museion, Bolzano.
In 1985 Fernandez finished the course "Modern Language and Literature" at the Faculty of Science of Language at the University of Porto. Between 1987 and 1990 he was a member of the Board of the Portuguese Association of Linguistics. He obtained the aggregation MA in Portuguese Phonology at the Lisbon University in 1992. Between 1987 and 1995 he was a professor and research fellow in Linguistic Studies at the Politechnical Institute in Porto. Between 1992 and 1996 Fernandez was a freelance commissioner of three editions of the Journal of Contemporary Art in Porto. In this period he also independently commissioned several exhibitions: Peninsulares which took place in 8 different galleries in Lisboa, Porto, Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona (1995), Hors catalogue(Maison de la Culture d'Amiens, France, 1996) and the exhibition Mais Tempo, Menos História (Fundação de Serralves, 1996). Fernandez has also organized and commissioned the Portuguese representation at the 1st Biennial of Johannesburg (1995) and the 24thBiennial of São Paulo (1998). He was a member of the Jury of the Visual Art Award União Latina between 1996 and 1999. Fernandez has published several texts in Portuguese and international artist catalogues. He is a member of the IKT (Internationale Kunstausstellungsleiter - Tagung). In 1996 he was nominated Assistant Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto. In January 2003 he was appointed Director of the Museum.
Since January 2006, Sophie von Olfers is assistant curator at Witte de With in Rotterdam, where she has worked on the group exhibition Don Quijote, the solo project and publication of Danish artist Jesper Just and, a series of debates on national representation (2007), as well as the mid-career exhibition of Liam Gillick. In 2007 she coordinated the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, together with curator of the Pavilion and director of Witte de With, Nicolaus Schafhausen. Previous to her position at Witte de With, Sophie worked with the London-based artist group The Artist Placement Group, together with founding members and artists John Latham and Barbara Steveni. She curated an archive exhibition and organized a conference on the group's history and legacy at Tate Britain. She did her MA in Curatorial Studies at Goldsmiths College, London.