The 11th Gwangju Biennale – The Curatorial Team
Artistic Director
Maria Lind is a curator and critic based in Stockholm, where she was born in 1966. She is the director of Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. 2008-2010 director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. 2005-2007 director of Iaspis in Stockholm. 2002-2004 she was the director of Kunstverein München where she together with a curatorial team ran a programme which involved artists such as Deimantas Narkevicius, Oda Projesi, Annika Eriksson, Bojan Sarcevic, Philippe Parreno and Marion von Osten. From 1997-2001 she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and, in 1998, co-curator of Manifesta 2, Europe’s biennale of contemporary art. Responsible for Moderna Museet Projekt, Lind worked with artists on a series of 29 commissions that took place in a temporary project-space, or within or beyond the Museum in Stockholm. Among the artists were Koo Jeong-a, Simon Starling, Jason Dodge, Esra Ersen. There she also curated What if: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design. In 2011 she guest-curated the group exhibition Abstract Possible: The Tamayo Take at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.
She has contributed widely to newspapers and magazines and to numerous catalogues and other publications. She is the co-editor of the books Curating with Light Luggage and Collected Newsletter (Revolver Archiv für aktuelle Kunst), Taking the Matter into Common Hands: Collaborative Practices in Contemporary Art (Blackdog Publishing), as well as the report European Cultural Policies 2015 (Iaspis and eipcp) and The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press). Among her recent co-edited publications are Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, Performing the Curatorial: With and Beyond Art, and Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe, all at Sternberg Press. She edited Abstraction as part of MIT’s and Whitechapel Gallery’s series Documents on Contemporary Art. She is the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In the fall of 2010 Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press.
Curatorial Team
Binna Choi is director of Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht, the Netherlands since 2008 where she takes up art and art institutional practice as a way to build a (micro) society in movement, in tandem with social movements. In this context, she conceived and co-developed with the team and numerous others a long-term project like Grand Domestic Revolution(2009-2013) and a three-year programme as a trajectory of inquiry and practice (2013-2015) entitled Composing the Commons, which include the research exhibition New Habits(2014) and compositional exhibition We Are the Time Machines: Time and Tools for Commoning (2015/2016); has been part of the faculty of the Dutch Art Institute /Masters of Fine Arts Programme in Arnhem; and working for and with a trans-local network Arts Collaboratory since 2013 as well as Cluster since 2012. Her work at Casco also include a close collaboration with many of the GB11 participating artists such as Crater Invertrido, Ruth Buchanan, Metahaven, AdelitaHusni-Bey, Fernando Garica-Dory, Christian Nyampeta, Natascha Sadr Haghighan, and The Otolith Group.
Her curatorial projects also involve the collaboration with other peers and in other public and institutional contexts. These include s three day seminar Cultivate or Revolutionize?: Life Between Apartment and Farmland at Times Museum, Guangzhou (2014, with Nikita Choi), summer school and exhibition Group Affinity at Kunstverein Munich (2011, with Bart van der Heide) and) and a research project Practice International with Grant Watson, LiseRosendahl and Andrea Philips on the notion of practice and internationalism (2013-2016). As part of her practice, she also engages with writing, editing, publishing, and contributing to symposiums and other discursive platforms with lectures, discussion and workshops.
Assistant Curator
Azar Mahmoudian is an independent curator and researcher based in Tehran. She co-ran a project space for artistic and social events in Tehran (2010-2015), which refrained from remaining under the radar and acted a space for mediation, debate, and conversation. She lectures in criticism and comparative art history at Tehran Art University and is a member of the research committee for the Tehran Biennial.
Her research develops from her ongoing engagement with displaying structures and modes of the political imaginary through exhibition forms, and more recently, the recycling of representational narratives in modern and contemporary art in the Iranian context. She pursues this line of thinking through her current archival research on the first exhibition of fine art at the Soviet House of Culture (Tehran, 1946) and the “5th (Regional) Tehran Biennial” (Tehran, 1966), and a long-term archival project documenting the rise of group exhibitions of contemporary Iranian art held outside Iran in the 2000s (2009-2011). She has curated exhibitions, projects, and screening programs, including “Iran and Co: Archive,” Cultuurcentrum Bruges (2010); “The Fold,” Contemporary Art Brussels (2013); “I’ve heard stories,” Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, (2014); and “Monitor 11: These Monsters Are Real,” South Asian Visual Art Center, Toronto(2015).
Margarida Mendes is a writer, curator, and educator. In 2009 she founded the project space The Barber Shop in Lisbon, where she hosts a programme of seminars and residencies dedicated to artistic and philosophical research. Exploring the overlap between cybernetics, philosophy, sciences, and experimental film, her personal research investigates the dynamic transformations of materialism and their impact on societal structures and cultural production. She is interested in exploring alternative modes of education and political resilience through her collaborative practice, programming and activism. Margarida Mendes has curated projects in various institutions, among them Flat Time House, London; KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, Liga; Berardo Museum, Lisbon; Spike Island Centre of Contemporary Art & Design, Bristol; 98 Weeks, Beirut; and Serralves Museum, Porto.
Margarida holds an MA in Aural and Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College of London, and in 2013 she was part of the Synapse Curatorial Research Group included in the Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, with writing in the volume Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, published by MIT Press (2004).
Michelle Wong is a Researcher at Asia Art Archive. Based in Hong Kong, she leads the Archive’s research projects in the city, including the Hong Kong Art History Research Project, organized in collaboration with the Hong Kong Museum of Art: a long-term endeavor started in 2013 to create a publicly available resource platform to support art historical research on recent art in Hong Kong. Her other projects include the Ha Bik Chuen Archive Pilot Project, which maps out exhibition documentation from 1960-2000 taken by late Hong Kong artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009), alongside other materials that were previously unavailable to the public. This was accompanied by the exhibition “Excessive Enthusiasm: Ha Bik Chuen and the Archive as Practice.” The Hong Kong Art History Research Project and Ha Bik Chuen Archive Project form a key part of an undergraduate course Asia Art Archive has developed in collaboration with the Fine Arts Department of the University of Hong Kong.
Wong is part of “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art,”a research program funded through the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, developed by The Power Institute Foundation for Art & Visual Culture at the University of Sydney in cooperation with regional partners, National Gallery Singapore and The Institute of Technology, Bandung.
Local curatorial associate
Mite-Ugro
Established in 2009, Mite-Ugro is collective supported by the voluntary participation of Gwangju’s visual artists and curators. In addition to its permanent personnel, a management committee comprising outside artists is brought on each year by Mite-Ugroto work on annual projects. Each year, this comimitee supports young artists and carries out an exchange with alternative spaces in Asia, such as those in Thailand, Japan, and Indonesia through its Artist-in-Residency program and international exchange exhibition. Mite-Ugro also organizes artist & curators talk, film screenings, and education programs for prospectisve promoters and artists. Furthermore, it publishes the cultural art review POST with Space Heem in Busan, and runs a open call for critical reviews with the goal of supporting the local production of criticism. Mite-Ugro has facilities such as an underground exhibition space, a community café on the ground floor, artist studios, and a guest house.
