2020 Speakers

Adam Szymczyk was Artistic Director of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017. He is Curator-at-Large at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
In 1997, he co-founded the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, to then work as Director of Kunsthalle Basel from 2003 to 2014. In 2008, he co-curated with Elena Filipovic the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, When Things Cast No Shadow. He is a Member of the Board of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Member of the Advisory Committee of Kontakt (The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation) in Vienna, where he also holds a seminar Undoing Landscape as guest lecturer at Akademie der bildenden Künste. In 2011, he received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement at the Menil Foundation in Houston.

Alessandro Vincentelli is Curator of Exhibitions & Research at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead where he has worked for more than 12 years. At BALTIC he has curated exhibitions with many international artists including Steve McQueen, Yoko Ono, Ed & Nancy Kienholz, Elizabeth Price, Lindsay Seers, Raqs Media Collective, Bani Abidi, Hajra Waheed, Martin Boyce, Tomas Saraceno, Rodney Graham, David Maljkovic, Bharti Kher and many others.
In the last few years he has developed and curated several significant solo presentations with artists John Akomfrah, Adam Pendleton, Susan, Philipsz and Heather Phillipson. In 2021 he is co-curator on a show of Sutapa Biswas at BALTIC, to be co-curated with Kettles Yard, Cambridge, and co-editor of a publication, the exhibition features new Biswas film Lumen, partly filmed in Mumbai and other locations.
In 2021 he is Artistic Director and Curator for a new international eco triennial EKO8 in Maribor, Slovenia developed by UGM, Maribor in a project titled A Letter to the Future, taking place in an abandoned textile factory in the city of Maribor Slovenia with presentations by more than 20 international artists.
He retains a strong interest in the work of South Asian artists and as curator, motivated by questions of transnationalism, new forms of assembly and radical citizenship.

Doryun Chong is Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator of M+, a new museum of visual culture that will open its Herzog & de Meuron–designed building in 2020, in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. Appointed as the inaugural Chief Curator in 2013, Chong oversees all curatorial activities and programmes, including acquisitions, exhibitions, learning and public programmes, and digital initiatives encompassing the museum’s three main disciplinary areas of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art. Some of the exhibitions he has curated or co-curated at M+ include Mobile M+: Live Art (2015), Tsang Kin-Wah: The Infinite Nothing, Hong Kong in Venice(2015), Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief World Tour (2018), and Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint (2018). Prior to joining M+, Chong worked in various curatorial capacities at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2003–2009) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009–2013).

Gitanjali Dang is a curator and writer but mostly a shape-shifter. In 2012, she founded Khanabadosh, an itinerant arts lab. Khanabadosh lives off latitude, agnosticism and magic, and is interested in everything. It is particularly interested in constantly rethinking what it—and everything around it—is about. In 2015, Gitanjali/Khanabadosh, in collaboration with Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR), Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), co-founded Draft. Gitanjali lives and loves in Mumbai and wherever else this living, and loving might take her.

Dr Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoan, Persian, Cantonese) works across visual arts, curatorial practice and university research. Ia intervenes in display territories to centre Indigenous presence, languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, ia engages with Indigenous possibility as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that erase faʻafafine-faʻatama from kinship structures. Ia/iel/they pronouns are preferred.
Ia contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, teaching and rights advocacy. Eshrāghi is a board secretary of the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, the inaugural Horizon/Indigenous Futures postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, a member of The Space Between Us SSHRC research partnership (2020-28) led by Dr Julie Nagam, and an affiliate member of the Wominjeka Djeembana research lab at Monash University led by Dr Brian Martin.

Naman P. Ahuja is a curator of Indian art and Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Most noted for his critically acclaimed exhibition on The Body in Indian Art and Thought (shown at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and the National Museum in Delhi in 2013-14), his curatorial work started at the British Museum in 2001, followed by exhibitions at Casa Asia in Barcelona, the Ashmolean in Oxford as well as numerous venues in India.
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. Previously, as Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, he authored a comprehensive catalogue of their collections of ancient Indian statuary and archaeological material: The Art & Archaeology of Ancient India, Oxford: Ashmolean, November 2018.
He has authored various books: Divine Presence: The Art of India and the Himalayas (Casa Asia and Five Continents Editions: Barcelona and Milan, 2003), The Making of the Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman: Devi Prasad (Routledge, 2011), The Body in Indian Art and Thought (Ludion, Antwerp, 2013), The Arts and Interiors of Rashtrapati Bhavan: Lutyens and Beyond (Publications Division, Delhi, 2016). More recently, India and the World: a history in nine stories (Delhi: Penguin, 2017) that accompanied an exhibition he co-curated for the CSMVS, Mumbai, explored the terms (vocabulary) and narratives through which Indian art can enter a discourse of globalisation.

Naomi Beckwith is the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and former curator at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Beckwith’s numerous exhibitions include, "The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now” and "30 Seconds off an Inch,” both considering the resonance of black culture across contemporary art internationally, and she has championed rising artists like Rashid Johnson, Keren Cytter, The Propeller Group and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
She has contributed to numerous catalogues and scholarly and periodical publications including Artforum International, Nka, Frieze, Patrkett, and The New York Times. Beckwith has served on many juries including the the jury of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and as a commissioner for the 2021 version of the French Pavillion. She holds an M.A. with Distinction from Courtauld Institute of Art and was a Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum. A multiple grantee, and now trustee, of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Beckwith is a also recipient of the New Leadership award for ArtTable.

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs Media Collective take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs Media Collective practices across several forms and media; it makes art, produces performances, writes, curates exhibitions, and occupies a unique position at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry. The members of of Raqs Media Collective live and work in Delhi, India. In 2001, they co-founded the Sarai program at CSDS New Delhi and ran it for a decade, where they also edited the Sarai Reader series. They are the Artistic Directors for the Yokohama Triennale (2020).

Reem Fadda is a curator and art historian. From 2010 to 2016, Fadda worked at the Guggenheim Museum as Associate Curator, Middle Eastern Art, Abu Dhabi Project. From 2005 to 2007, Fadda was Director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA), Ramallah and served as Academic Director for the International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah. She has curated many international exhibitions and biennials, including Jerusalem Lives (Tahya Al Quds), The Palestinian Museum, Birzeit (2017); Not New Now, 6th Marrakech Biennale, (2016) and the United Arab Emirates National Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013). Fadda was awarded the eighth Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2017 and is a 2019 Fellow of the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. She currently works as Director of the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi.

Zasha Colah’s art writing and curatorial research turn around contemporary art in Indo-Burma since the late 80s. Her latest essays on this region have been included in 'Interlaced Journeys: Diaspora and the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art' (eds. Patrick D Flores and Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, Osage Art Foundation, 2020) and in 'Art & Ecology' (eds. Ravi Agarwal and Latika Gupta, Marg, 2020). Her writing on the curatorial has been included in 'The New Curator' (ed. Natasha Hoare et al., Laurence King, 2016); in 'The Curatorial Conundrum' (ed. Paul O’Neill et al., MIT Press, 2016); 'Curating Under Pressure' (ed. Elke aus dem Moore, OnCurating journal 38, 2018). She co-founded the research collaborative blackrice in Tuensang, Nagaland (2007). She worked as a curator of modern Indian art at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai (2009-2011). She co-founded the curatorial collaborative and union of artists Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (under which she curated projects collaboratively with Sumesh Sharma from 2010-2015). She curated ‘body luggage’, (Kunsthaus and steirischer herbst, Graz, 2016); ‘I love you Sugar Kane’(ICIAO, Mauritius, 2016). She co-curated with Luca Cerizza ‘Prabhakar Pachpute’ (National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2016), and the third Pune Biennale (2017). She was part of the curatorial team under Marco Scotini of the second Yinchuan Biennale (2018). She teaches comparative curatorial theory in the Master of Visual Arts & Curatorial Studies department, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan (since 2018). She is co-curator with Marianne Zamecznik of a year-long public art commission for Deichmanske bibliotek, National Public Library, Oslo.

Natasha Ginwala is a curator and writer. She is Associate Curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin and artistic director of COLOMBOSCOPE, Colombo. Ginwala has curated Contour Biennale 8, “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium” and was part of the curatorial team of documenta14, 2017. Other recent projects include “Arrival, Incision. Indian Modernism as Peripatetic Itinerary” in the framework of “Hello World. Revising a Collection” at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2018; “Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future” at ifa Gallery Berlin and Stuttgart, 2018; “My East is Your West” at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015; and “Corruption: Everybody Knows…” with e-flux, New York, 2015. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2014, and co-curated “The Museum of Rhythm” at Taipei Biennial 2012 and at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2016–2017. From 2013–2015, in collaboration with Vivian Ziherl, she led the multi-part curatorial project “Landings” presented at various partner organizations. Ginwala writes on contemporary art and visual culture in various periodicals and has contributed to numerous publications. She is a recipient of the 2018 visual arts research grant from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.