Jonathan Watkins has been the Director of Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK, since 1999. Previously he worked for a number of years in London, as Curator of the Serpentine Gallery (1995-1997) and Director of Chisenhale Gallery (1990-1995). Watkins has curated a number of large international exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney (1998); ‘Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art’ (Hayward Gallery, London 2001); ‘Quotidiana’ (Castello di Rivoli, Turin 1999); Tate Triennial (2003); Shanghai Biennale (2006); Sharjah Biennial (2007); ‘Negotiations’ (Today Art Museum, Beijing 2010); and the Guangzhou Triennial (2012). He was part of the curatorial team for ‘Europarte’ (Venice Biennale, 1997); ‘Milano Europa 2000’, (Palazzo di Triennale, Milan 2000); and ‘Riwaq’ (Palestinian Biennial 2007). He also curated the Iraqi Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2013. Watkins has written extensively on contemporary art. Recent essays by him have focused on the work of Giuseppe Penone, Martin Creed, Semyon Faibisovich, Yang Zhenzhong, Noguchi Rika, Caro Niederer, Beat Streuli and Cornelia Parker. He was the author of the Phaidon monograph on Japanese artist On Kawara.
Visitors 2014
Nigel Prince is the Executive Director of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada. Prior to this he was Curator at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK, where he was responsible for an international programme, making solo exhibitions and publications with artists including Arturo Herrera, Donald Judd, Olafur Eliasson, Martin Boyce, Shahzia Sikander, Ryan Gander, Victor Man and Susan Philipsz amongst many others. His exhibition of paintings and drawings by Cuban artist Carmen Herrera in 2009 was critically heralded as the ’discovery of the decade’ by several international newspapers. While at Ikon he helped launch many Canadian artists on to an international platform providing them with their first museum shows, in particular Marcel Dzama, Steven Shearer and Roy Arden. He has worked with institutions as diverse as the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco, CA, USA; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland; and the Venice Biennale, Italy.
Diana Campbell Betancourt is an American born curator based in Mumbai. She is the Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation and the Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, the world’s largest South Asia Focused art festival. She has curated significant projects with South Asian artists such as Shilpa Gupta, Shahzia Sikander, Rashid Rana, Naeem Mohaiemen, Raqs Media Collective, and Asim Waqif, among others. In addition to running the Foundation’s exhibitions and international exchange programs, she is building the Samdani Art Foundation collection ahead of the opening of a permanent space in Sylhet, Bangladesh. Betancourt has also lead the development of the Creative India Foundation, a private foundation supporting Indian sculpture internationally and building India’s first international sculpture park. Betancourt co-curated ‘Energy Plus’, the Mumbai City Pavilion for the 9th Shanghai Biennale in Shanghai, China, and is a curatorial advisor for the upcoming 2015 New Museum Triennial in New York, NY, USA.
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. Her exhibitions include ‘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), that also was shown at the Power Station of art in Shanghai (2014). In 2015, Dressen will co-curate a retrospective of artist Carol Rama in collaboration with the MACBA in Barcelona, Spain. The exhibition is also scheduled to travel to Helsinki, Finland; Dublin, Ireland; and Turin, Italy, in 2015-16. Her texts have been published in institutional catalogues, artists’ publications and in magazines such as Artforum, Frog, Petunia, Flashart International and The Exhibitionist. In 2014 Dressen was nominated for the ‘Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Award ‘ by Independent Curators International (ICI), under the direction of Guggenheim Deputy Director Nancy Spector.
Olga Shishko is a curator and a researcher of media culture, and since 2006 Director of the Centre of Culture and Art, also called MediaArtLab, which she founded in 2000. MediaArtLab develops research on different aspects of contemporary art involving media technologies, such as online art and cyberculture. She has curated numerous events, festivals and exhibitions including: ‘NewMediaLogia’ Symposium, Moscow (1994), ‘Pro&Contra’ Symposium, Moscow (2000–12), ‘MediaForum’ Multimedia Art Festival (since 2000) – one of the official programmes of the Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF), the exhibition ‘Transitland – Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe for 20 years: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to 2009’, Moscow (2010), ‘Viewer' – Gary Hill, Moscow (2010), ‘Expanded Cinema’, Moscow (2011), ‘Immersions: Towards the Tactile Cinema’, Moscow (2013), ‘Mocumentary: Reality is Not Enough’, Moscow (2013). Shishko has served in juries of various international exhibitions, like ‘Art on the Net’, Internet Festival, Japan (1998-2000) and ‘Art Vifu’, England (2000).
Jean-Max Colard is an art critic, curator, and a lecturer at the University of Lille 3, where he teaches contemporary literature and its relation to contemporary art. He is a writer for the magazine Les Inrockuptibles, where he is responsible for the arts section. Colard has curated exhibitions such as ‘Perpetual Battle’ at Baibakov Arts Projects in Moscow, Russia (2010); ‘Offshore’ at the Ricard Foundation in Paris, France (2005); and ‘La Nuit des tableaux vivants’ created together with Christian Bernard in Toulouse, France (2009), travelling to Paris (2012) and Geneva, Switzerland (2015). He is currently preparing ‘Song Duras’, an exhibition dedicated to the work of Marguerite Duras scheduled to open at the Centre Pompidou in October 2014. Among his publications are L’exposition de mes rêves (Mamco, 2013).
Yury Kopytov is the Deputy Head of Exhibitions Department and Head of Publications Programmes at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMoMA). Among his latest projects is ‘Jan van Toorn. Dialogue with the Public’, an exhibition that was part of the Russia-Netherlands year of cultural exchange in 2013. He was also the editor of the catalogue P183 accompanying the MMoMA exhibition dedicated to street art artist Pavel Pukhov in 2014. Kopytov holds an MA from the Department of History of Visual and Media Arts at the Russian State University for Humanitarians. In 2012 he received the Golden Medal from the Russian Academy of Arts for his contribution to the arts and culture.
José Fernández Portal is part of the curatorial team of the 12th Havana Biennial ‘Between the Idea and Experience’ in Havana, Cuba. Portal graduated from Moscow State University with an MA in Philosophy in 1982. From 1982 to 1992 he was a professor at the Tecnological University José Antonio Echeverría in Havana, before he became the Director of the Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales in Havana, where he organised the First and the Second Saloon of Contemporary Cuban Art. As a curator Portal has broad experience in organising exhibitions involving contemporary Cuban artists, both in Cuba and internationally; as well as local exhibitions presenting international artists. Since 1999 he has been working as a curator at the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center in Havana.
Aimee Lin is the Editorial director of ArtReviewAsia. After receiving her MA in Comparative Literature at Fudan University, Lin has maintained a complex professional identity ranging from journalism, editing, writing, criticism and curating to publication management. She was the founding editor of LEAP, a bilingual magazine on Chinese contemporary art, where she left in 2012 as the acting editorial director. She has been the Editorial Director for ArtReviewAsia, a sister magazine to the British art magazine ArtReview, since its Asia inauguration in 2013. In the same year, she curated Yu Honglei’s third solo show 'Everything Is Extremely Important: There Is Nothing That Will Never Come Back Again' at Magician Space in Beijing, China.
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).
Rasa Antanavičiūtė is the Executive Director of the Nida Art Colony (NAC), a subdivision of the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Located on the Curonian spit in the Baltic Sea five hours away from the Lithuanian capital, NAC was opened in March 2011 with an aim to create favourable conditions for creative contemporary art practices as well as for the implementation of innovations in art education by promoting international cooperation. NAC runs an international artist-in-residence programme, organises and hosts local and international workshops, summer schools, presentations, exhibitions and film screenings. Antanavičiūtė works with art and education project management, the Nida artist-in-residence programme and other issues related to art and education. With a background in art history, her main research interest lies in the history of symbolic public spaces and their function as identity builders, memory constructors and targets of political powers.
Claire Mander is the Deputy Director and Curator at The Royal British Society of Sculptors (RBS), an independent artist-led organisation which is the oldest and largest dedicated to sculpture in the United Kingdom. She works with emerging and established contemporary artists and sculptors through collaborations and projects in both the public and private spheres. She has extensive experience in working in various museums, auction houses in London and Paris and not-for-profit arts organisations. Most recently, she set up a contemporary gallery within an existing modern commercial gallery in London, where she curated exhibitions of work by contemporary artists working in all media. Mander obtained her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2004.
Ekaterina Inozemtseva is the Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia (MAMM) since 2011. Founded in 1996 under the name Moscow House of Photography (MAMM), the museum was the first Russian State institution devoted to the art of photography. It was reorganised in 2001 as the State Cultural Institution Multimedia Complex of Contemporary Art/Multimedia Art Museum. During her time at MAMM Inozemtseva has realised more than fifty projects (among others around seminal figures such as Wim Wenders, Chris Marker, Veruschka and Charlie Chaplin). Prior to this post she has been affiliated with several art institutions, such as the National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow (NCCA) and Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, where she worked as exhibition coordinator, and Proun gallery, Moscow, Russia where she was the deputy Art Curator. She also co-curated the exhibition ‘Italian ZERO and the Avant-garde of the 60s’. Inozemtseva holds a PhD from Moscow State Lomonossov University, and is an active writer and critic. She was also the editor of the catalogue of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary art.
Daria Pyrkina has been the Curator of Exhibitions and Public Events and Head of New Generation Programme at The National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), Moscow, Russia, since 2001. In 2013 she became the Deputy Director General for artistic and educational affairs of the NCCA. Prior to this post Pyrkina was Assisting Professor at the Moscow State Lomonosov University (2009–2013), a visiting lecturer at the same University from 2007–2008, as well as a visiting lecturer at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia from 2009–2011. She holds a PhD in Art History and is the author of over seventy publications in Russian, English and Spanish devoted to contemporary art practices in Russia and abroad, and has been a contributor for Moscow Art Magazine, Iskusstvo, Dialogue of Arts, as well as having edited numerous exhibition catalogues.