2017 Speakers

Barbara Piwowarska, is curator and art historian specialized in the legacy of the avant-garde and in contemporary art. In past years she curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions and projects such as: Polish New Wave at Tate Modern, London and Anthology Film Archives, New York; Polish Socialist Conceptualism of the 70s at Orchard, New York; Film Matters at Beton7, Athens; Die at COCO Kunstverein, Vienna; Erna Rosenstein: I Can Repeat Only Unconsciously at Foksal Gallery Foundation and Edward Krasiński Studio, Warsaw; The Third Room at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Jadwiga Maziarska 1913-2003 at Johnen Galerie, Berlin; Zofia and Oskar Hansen: Private Spaces at Arton Foundation, Warsaw. Since 2010 she runs the Footnote project employing “methodology of margins”, referencing existing institutions and concepts in format of exhibitions and interventions, including: Footnote 1. Phantom Limb at CCA, Warsaw; Footnote 3. Andrea Fraser at Foksal Gallery, Warsaw; Footnote 5. Screening Space at MUMOK, Vienna; Footnote 6. As Model at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; or Footnote 10: Museum of the Unknown at Centre Pompidou, Paris. Since 2016 she works as curator at Galeria Studio in Warsaw, where she recently organized Aura Rosenberg’s exhibition Angel of History devoted to contemporary reception of Walter Benjamin. In 2017 she curated Polish Pavilion for 57. Venice Biennale with the Little Review project by Sharon Lockhart prepared in collaboration with teenaged women from Youth Centre for Socio-Therapy in Rudzienko, inspired by theory and practice of the pre-war pedagogue and writer Janusz Korczak.

Catherine David is a curator and art historian. She is currently Deputy Director of the Musée national d’art moderne -Centre Pompidou since 2014. From 1982 to 1990 she was Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou and from 1990 to 1994 at Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, both in Paris, where she organized several solo and group exhibitions. From 1994 to 1997 David served as Artistic Director for documenta X in Kassel, Germany, and from 1998 on is Director of the long-term project Contemporary Arab Representations produced by Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona. Between 2002 and 2004 David was Director of the Witte de With Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In 2005-2006 she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She organized a monograph exhibition of Bahman Jalali at Tàpies Fondation in Barcelona (2007) and the interdisciplinary event: Di/ Visions: Culture and Politics of the Middle East at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2007). In 2008 she received the Bard Award for curatorial excellence in New York. In 2009 she was curator of the ADACH (Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage) pavilion at Venice Biennal. In March 2011 she organized the Hassan Sharif’s Exhibition Experiments & Objects 1979-2011 at the ADACH Exhibition hall in Abu Dhabi and the first monograph of the Artist Works 1973-2011 (Hatje Cantz). In 2013 she presented MARWAN Early Works 1962-1972 at Beirut Exhibition Center. In 2014 UNEDITED HISTORY: Iran 1960-2014 at Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, in 2015 WIFREDO LAM at Musée national d’art moderne Centre Georges Pompidou and in 2016 DIA Al-AZZAWI: A RETROSPECTIVE (from 1963 until tomorrow), at MATHAF Doha

Hammad Nasar is a curator, writer, and researcher based in London. He was Head of Research and Programmes at Asia Art Archive (AAA), Hong Kong (2012-2016), and earlier co-founded (with Anita Dawood) the non-profit arts organisation Green Cardamom (2004-2012). He curated Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play – the UAE’s national pavilion at the 57th Venice Art Biennale (2017). Selected public exhibitions he curated or co-curated include: Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space at Johnson Museum, Cornell University & Nasher Museum, Duke University (2012-13); Drawn from Life at Abbot Hall, Kendal (2011); Beyond the Page: The Miniature as Attitude in Contemporary Art from Pakistan at Manchester Art Gallery & Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena (2006-10); Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010); Safavids Revisited at British Museum, London (2009); Who are you? Where are you really from? at Whitworth Gallery, Manchester (2006); and Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT and Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2005-7). At AAA he ‘curated’ numerous collaborative research projects with diverse institutions including: the University of Hong Kong, the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Indonesian Visual Art Archive, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He also led various exhibition projects, including: Excessive Enthusiasm: Ha Bik Chuen and the Archive as Practice (2015); and the multi-part 15 Invitations for 15 years (2015-2017) including projects by Shilpa Gupta, Marysia Lewandowska, Walid Raad, Rashid Rana, ruangrupa and T. Shanaathanan.

Lauren Cornell is Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art. From 2005-2017, Cornell worked at the New Museum, most recently as Curator and Associate Director of Technology Initiatives. At the New Museum, Cornell organized exhibitions including the 2015 New Museum Triennial, “Surround Audience,” with artist Ryan Trecartin, “Beatriz Santiago Munoz: Song, Strategy, Sign,” with Johanna Burton and Sara O’Keeffe (2016); “Walking, Drifting, Dragging” (2013); “Free” (2010); and “Younger than Jesus,” with Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman (2009), among others. Cornell produced over eighty performances, screenings, and conversations while at the New Museum, and commissioned over one hundred works in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, painting, photography, installation, and video, as well as browser-based work and virtual reality. In 2010, she founded the annual conference Seven on Seven and, in 2016, she cofounded Open Score, an annual forum exploring issues in art and technology. From 2005–2012, she served as executive director of the New Museum’s affiliate Rhizome, an organization that commissions, exhibits, and preserves art engaged with technology. She is a coeditor, with Ed Halter, of Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (New Museum and MIT Press, 2015). Cornellhas served on Bard Center for Curatorial Studies faculty since 2010, and organized the Hessel Museum’s tenth anniversary exhibition “Invisible Adversaries” with Tom Eccles. In 2017, Cornell received ArtTable’s New Leadership Award.

Nada Raza is the Research Curator for Tate Research Centre: Asia with a particular focus on South Asian art. Raza is also the Curator for the South Asian Acquisitions Committee, working on major acquisitions from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Previously the Assistant Curator at Tate Modern (2012 – 2016), Raza co-curated Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All at Tate Modern (2016) and contributed to Meschac Gaba: Museum of Contemporary African Art (2013). She curated the collection displays of work by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Zarina Hashmi, and of Sheela Gowda. Raza also curated a thematic exhibition for the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh in 2016 and was selected to be the curator of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2014.

Olivier Kaeser is an art historian and curator born in 1963, currently co-director of Swiss cultural center in Paris with Jean-Paul Felley. After graduating at the University of Geneva, he worked at the Contemporary art center in this city, and then founded the independent art space attitudes in 1994, already with Jean-Paul Felley. Under this name, both curated exhibitions and public programs in Switzerland and other European countries, as well as in Argentina, Chile and Lebanon. Swiss cultural center is a multidisciplinary institution dedicated mainly to contemporary Swiss artistic practices, such as contemporary art, theater, dance, music, performance, architecture, graphic design or literature. It is part of Pro Helvetia, the Swiss foundation for culture.

 Pedro de Almeida is program manager at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. As an arts manager, curator, programmer and writer, over the past decade he has developed and delivered artistic and cultural programs that have been distinguished by their engagement of culturally and socially diverse artists, communities and audiences. Curatorial projects for 4A include Dacchi Dang: An Omen Near and Far (2017), a survey of one of the preeminent Vietnamese-Australian artists working today; Sea Pearl White Cloud, (2016, co-curated with Anthony Yung, Observation Society), a two part exhibition staged in Guangzhou and Sydney that presented new works by Lucas Ihlein and Trevor Yeung informed by questions of temporality, exchange and poetics at play in urban and natural environments; and MASS GROUP INCIDENT (2015, cocurated with Toby Chapman and Aaron Seeto), a multi-stage program of exhibitions, performances and sitespecific projects that explored ideas of collective action through the complex position of the individual in relation to the group. Pedro’s critical writing on art is published regularly, appearing in ArtAsiaPacific, Art Monthly Australasia, Broadsheet Journal, LEAP, Photofile and un Magazine among others. He is editor of 4A Papers, a newly established online platform for writing on contemporary art and culture in the Asia Pacific region, and is a member of Broadsheet Journal’s international editorial advisory board. Pedro is currently undertaking a MPhil at the University of New South Wales Art & Design with a research focus on the politics of art projects in public housing sites.

Reem Fadda was the former Associate Curator, Middle Eastern Art for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project from 2010-2016. Between 2005 and 2007, she was Director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA) and worked as Academic Director to the International Academy of Art – Palestine, which she helped found in 2006. She was appointed as the Curator for the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates of the 55th Venice Biennale, 2012. And was recently the curator of the 6th Marrakech Biennale, held Feb-May 2016. She will curate the inaugural exhibition of the Palestinian Museum, in Ramallah opening on September 1, 2017. Fadda was awarded the 2017 8th Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement awarded by the Menil Collection.

 Roobina Karode is the Director & Chief Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India. She has post-graduate specializations in Art History and in Education. Between 1990 and 2006, she taught Art History at various institutions, mainly the School of Arts & Aesthetics in JNU, the National Museum Institute, College of Art, Jamia Millia University, Gargi College, NIFT and Shankar’s Academy of Art & Book Publishing in New Delhi. She was awarded the Fulbright Fellowship in 2000 and the Ford Teaching Fellowship in 2005-7. Karode has over the years curated numerous exhibitions both within India and abroad including Nasreen Mohamedi: a view to infinity, 2013 and Is it what you think? Ruminations on Time, Memory and Site, 2014 at KNMA with 17 contemporary artists, Nasreen Mohamedi: waiting is a part of intense living, 2015 at the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain and co-curated NASREEN MOHAMEDI at the MET Breuer, New York in 2016, Nalini Malaini’s Retrospective You can’t put acid in a paperbag 2014 in 3 chapters, Constructs-Constructions, Pond near the Field ( Five artists from Kerala) , Himmat Shah: Hammer on the Square, 2016, Jeram Patel : The Dark Loam- between memory and membrane, Enactments and each passing day and Stretched Terrains – a string of exhibitions re-examining the evolution of modern in the Indian context, presenting different ingenious pursuits, proposals and vocabularies, evident in architecture, the visual arts, films, photographs and writings. She had also co-curated travelling exhibits on seventeen contemporary women artists of India at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, USA, titled Tiger by the Tail, Women Artists of India Transforming Culture, 2008. She was also the co-curator from India to the First Asian Art Triennale in Fukuoka, Japan. In 2016, she was the recipient of the India Today Best Curator award for the year.

RUBA KATRIB is Curator at SculptureCenter in New York City. At SculptureCenter she has produced the group shows “The Eccentrics” (2015), “Puddle, Pothole, Portal” (2014) (co-curated with artist Camille Henrot), “Better Homes” (2013), and “A Disagreeable Object” (2012). Recent solo shows organized include exhibitions with Sam Anderson, Teresa Burga, Charlotte Prodger, Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) (all 2017), Cosima von Bonin, Aki Sasamoto, Rochelle Goldberg (all 2016), Anthea Hamilton, Gabriel Sierra, Magali Reus, Michael E. Smith, Erika Verzutti, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (all 2015), Jumana Manna, and David Douard (both 2014). Katrib also regularly organizes panels, lectures, and performances at SculptureCenter.

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. She 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) and at Muzeum Sztuki 2016–2017 (with Daniel Muzyczuk). From 2013–15 she led the multi-part curatorial project Landings presented at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, David Roberts Art Foundation, 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.