2016 Speakers

Ariana Pradal, trained as an industrial designer, works as a journalist and curator. She writes and works regularly for various magazines and museums in the field of design and architecture. Her articles, books and exhibitions have been printed and presented in Switzerland and abroad. Ariana Pradal studied industrial design at the Zurich School of Art and Design, (now the Zurich University of the Arts, Zhdk). Subsequently, she started to write on object design. Pradal went onto completing a two-year traineeship with Hochparterre, a Swiss journal of design and architecture, while at the same time taking courses at the Swiss School of Journalism in Lucerne. During her time at Hochparterre she wrote articles, designed exhibitions, worked on books and gave lectures. She also spent six months in New York with Location, Switzerland, the Swiss economic promotion body. After returning to Switzerland she spent three years working part time for the architectural journal Werk, Bauen und Wohnen, (wbw.ch). At the same time she wrote for other journals, and was commissioned by the Industrial Design section of the Zhdk to work on a project with the Pro Pueblo foundation in Ecuador. In 2010 she was appointed by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture for the Mediation in Art and Architecture award 2010.

Cosmin Costinas (b. 1982, Romania) is the Director of Para Site, Hong Kong. He was co-curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014-2015), Curator of BAK, Utrecht (2008- 2011), co-curator of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2010) and Editor of dOCUMENTA 12 Magazines (2005–2007). At Para Site, Costinas oversaw the institution's relocation to a new home in 2015 and curated: Afterwork (with Freya Chou, Inti Guerrero, and Qinyi Lim, 2016); The World is Our Home. A Poem on Abstraction (with Inti Guerrero, 2015-2016); Sheela Gowda (2015); the conference Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The new performance turn, its histories and its institutions (with Ana Janevski, 2014); Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s— Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (with Doryun Chong and Lesley Ma, toured at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2013-2015 and MUAC, Mexico City, 2016); A Journal of the Plague Year (with Inti Guerrero, toured at The Cube, Taipei; Arko Art Center, Seoul; and Kadist Art Foundation and The Lab, San Francisco; 2013-2015); Taiping Tianguo, A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York (with Doryun Chong, toured at SALT, Istanbul; NUS Museum, Singapore; eflux, New York; 2012-2014), a.o. At BAK, he curated Spacecraft Icarus 13. Narratives of Progress from Elsewhere (2011)

Dayanita Singh is an artist who uses photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which one relates to photographic images. Her recent work, drawn from her extensive photographic oeuvre, is a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Stemming from Singh’s interest in the archive, the museums present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are replete with both poetic and narrative possibilities. Publishing is also a significant part of the artist’s practice: in her books, often made in collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, she experiments with alternate forms of producing and viewing photographs. Here, Singh’s latest is the “book-object,” a work that is concurrently a book, an art object, an exhibition and a catalogue. This work, also developing from the artist’s interest in the poetic and narrative possibility of sequence and re-sequence, allows Singh to both create photographic sequence and also simultaneously disrupt it. Over the last few years Singh has been involved with her ongoing project Museum Bhavan, which has been shown at the Hayward Gallery, London (2013), the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014), the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2014) and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2016). Singh has also authored eleven books. Her twelfth book, Museum Bhavan, also published with Steidl, is forthcoming in Fall 2016.

Giorgio Galleani is an Italian Architect and a PhD in Interior and exhibition design. Between 2001- 05, he worked as a researcher at the Department of Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture of the Milan Polytechnic on issues of social housing. During the same period he served as a visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Design and at the two campuses of the Faculty of Architecture of the Milan Polytechnic, developing with the students, exhibition design projects, with reference to historical examples both at the expositive fair Fiera di Milano and the Triennale di Milano. From 2006 he started working for the Triennale di Milano as a collaborator to the realization both of temporary exhibitions and the various editions of the museum. Since 2009 he is responsible for the Permanent Collection of Italian Design, and from 2010 for the Italian Design Archives. He has been a guest speaker at the italian university Scuola Politecnica di Design (2006, 2007); at the Institute for the international education of students of the Università Cattolica (2006); at the European Conference of the Design Museums, Muscon 2008 at the Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, Spain and Muscon 2009, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. He has been a Member of the Scientific Committee and also Lecturer at the Advanced Training Course for Collection/Exhibit Registrar for contemporary art and design at Enaip, in Milan (2009- 2010).

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968 in Zurich, CH) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. 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. In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is contributing editor to several magazines and journals. His recent publications include Conversations in Mexico, Ways of Curating, The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar, and Lives of The Artists, Lives of The Architects.

Prof. Dr. Habil. Marta Smolińska is a Polish art historian, art critic and freelance curator. She was assistant professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Faculty of Modern and Contemporary Art) from 2003-14 and professor at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań. Smolinska was awarded the Foundation for Polish Science grant three times as well as several other fellowships and scholarships including the Hans Arp Foundation in Berlin fellowship in 2015. She is a member of Polish Section of AICA. Smolińska has authored numerous publications on modern and contemporary art, including four books “The pulse of art” (Poznań 2010); “Young Mehoffer” (Kraków 2004); “Opening the painting: De(con)struction of universal seeing mechanisms in nonrepresentational easel painting of the 2nd half of the 20th century.” (Toruń 2012); “Julian Stańczak: Op Art and the Dynamic of Perception” (Warszawa 2014) and several articles. Exhibitions curated by her include “Illegibility: the contexts of script” at the Art Stations Foundation Gallery in Poznań (2016); “(Don’t) touch! Haptic aspects of Polish modern and contemporary art” at the Center for Contemporary Art in Toruń (which included works by 31 Polish artists); “By a hair” at the Centrum Kultury Zamek in Poznań (both 2015).

Maud Page is Deputy Director, Collection and Exhibitions at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, Australia. Her position oversees all aspects of the gallery’s curatorial activities, and is directly responsible for the management and development of the gallery’s collections and exhibitions. Maud joined the gallery in 2002 and was senior curator, Contemporary Pacific prior to taking up her senior management role. She has been a member of the curatorium for the gallery’s flagship exhibition series, The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT), since 2002, and has curated key projects within APT including Pacific Reggae in 2009 and Kalpa Vriksha: Contemporary Indigenous and Vernacular Art of India in 2015. In 2009 she curated ‘Unnerved: The New Zealand Project, and was lead curator for ‘Paperskin, Barkcloth Across the Pacific’ which toured to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. In 2015 she curated ‘Michael Parekowhai: The Promised Land’. Maud has written and lectured extensively, including teaching Museum Studies at Sydney University and Hong Kong University. Her key area of research is how Indigenous and vernacular practices intertwine with contemporary art.

Naman P. Ahuja is a curator of Indian art, Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Editor of Marg Publications. Over successive Fellowships at the Getty Institute he has researched the art of Gandhara and its connections with the wider Roman world. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Zurich, the KunsthistorischesInstitute in Florence, the University of Alberta in Edmonton and at SOAS, his alma mater. His studies on terracottas, ivories and small finds have drawn attention to the foundations of Indian iconography and transcultural exchanges at an everyday, quotidian level. His book, The Making of the Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman: Devi Prasad (Routledge, 2011), provided a case-study of the impact of the Arts and Crafts Movement on India. Divine Presence: The Arts of India and the Himalayas (Five continents editions, Milan, 2003, translated into Catalan and Spanish) is a succinct introduction to the forms and styles of Indian sculpture. And more recently, The Body in Indian Art and Thought (Ludion, Antwerp, 2013) explores a variety of fundamental approaches to the aesthetics of anthropomorphic representation in India and what are the larger ideas that drive people to make images.

Natasha Ginwala is a curator, researcher, and writer. She is curator of Contour Biennale 8 and curatorial advisor for dOCUMENTA 14 (2017). Recent projects include My East is Your West featuring Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana at the 56th Venice Biennale; Still Against the Sky at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Corruption...Everybody Knows with e-flux, New York within the framework of the SUPERCOMMUNITY project. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (with Juan A. Gaitán) and curated The Museum of Rhythm at Taipei Biennial 2012 (with Anselm Franke). From 2013-15 she led the multi part curatorial project Landings presented at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, David Roberts Art Foundation, NGBK (as part ofthe Tagore, Pedagogy, and Contemporary Visual Cultures Network) the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other partner organizations (with Vivian Ziherl). Ginwala writes on contemporary art and visual culture in various periodicals and has contributed to numerous publications.

Rahaab Allana is curator of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi, and fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. He had an early engagement with the National Gallery of Modern Art, and has subsequently curated, edited and contributed to national and international arts institutions and publications - including Marg, the Lalit Kala Contemporary, The British journal of Photography among others. The exhibitions have been realised in The Brunei Gallery (London), The Photography Museum (Berlin) the Rubin Museum (NY), the Royal Fine Art Museum (Brussels), the National Gallery of Modern Art and the National Museum (New Delhi) among others. Rahaab has also had a solo exhibition of his own photographs, taken over the last 12 years of his experiences related to heritage in India and South Asia, entitled Worlds of Difference at the Romain Rolland Gallery, Alliance Francaise, Delhi, April, 2010. In 2014 he co-published a book from his own private collection of Cinema stills and ephemera, titled Filmi Jagat: Shared Universe of Early Hindi Cinema, exploring a subculture of photography and print media through a found scrapbook. Rahaab has been the editor of PIX for over 5 years, India’s first theme-based photography quarterly and exhibitionary platform. Its next issue, the 13th, is a Special one dedicated to photography from Burma/Myanmar. Rahaab will be the chief Curator of the Fete de la Photo in 2017, a French Embassy festival of photography in 4 cities, to commemorate the birth of the medium 200 years ago by Nieciphore Niepce.

Dr Susie Lingham is an interdisciplinary and independent thinker, writer and maker in the arts, whose work synthesizes ideas relating to the nature of mind across different fields, from the humanities to the sciences. Her art practice incorporates writing, performance, sound and image. As director of the Singapore Art Museum between August 2013 and March 2016, Susie worked to shape its new vision and mission as the contemporary art museum of Singapore, setting the new creative and curatorial direction and acquisition strategy of SAM. She oversaw the development, organization and curating of 11 exhibitions, which included Medium at Large: Shapeshifting Material and Methods in Contemporary Art (April 2014 – May 2015); Still Moving: A Triple Bill on the Image (October 2014 – 8 February 2015); After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art (May – October 2015); and 5 Stars: Art Reflects on Peace, Justice, Equality, Democracy and Progress (October 2015 to June 2016). Prior to her appointment at SAM, she was assistant professor at the National Institute of Education (Visual & Performing Arts). Currently, she is the Creative Director of the Singapore Biennale 2016, the 10th edition of the country’s premier international visual art festival, titled An Atlas of Mirrors.