Visitor Programme 2020

Christina Gigliotti
Independent curator
Online meetings 14 & 21 December

Christina Gigliotti is an American independent curator and writer living in Berlin. She is the assistant to the director and artist liaison at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. She also co-curates the programs for Polansky Gallery in Prague and Brno. Since 2015, she has curated over 55 exhibition projects throughout Europe and abroad, and has been published in a number of publications including magazines, artist books, and catalogues.

Samuel Leuenberger 
Independent curator
Online meetings 30 November, 2 & 7 December

Independent curator, Samuel Leuenberger has been running the not-for-profit exhibition space SALTS in Birsfelden, near Basel, Switzerland, since 2009, promoting young Swiss and international artists. Since 2016, he is the lead curator of Art Basel’s Parcours sector, a large inner city sculpture and performance project. Since 2012, Leuenberger has worked with the Swiss Arts Council ProHelvetia on several occasions. More recently, he was an associate curator of Salon Suisse 2017, the collateral public program of the Swiss Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. 

Alongside the work at SALTS and Parcours, he has been appointed as new Mediator for the New Patrons (Les Nouveaux Commanditaires) in Switzerland. The role of the New Patrons is to offer an open, democratic platform, where citizens from all backgrounds can engage in a process of commissioning, producing and presenting an artwork, a place of encounter or temporary event in the public space. As a committee member of Basel’s cultural department, Kunstkredit Basel, he plays a role in supporting the local and regional art scene by advocating and advising on funding allocation. He regularly teaches at art schools, and has just most recently finished his tenure at ZHDK in Zurich.

Pieternel Vermoortel
Artistic director, Netwerk Aalst
Online meetings 8 July

Pieternel Vermoortel is artistic director of Netwerk Aalst. The current artistic program that results in institutional change The Astronaut Metaphor (2020 – 2022) engages a.o. with the practices of Bianca Baldi, Jeremiah Day, Vanessa Joan Muller, Dora Garcia, Lucile Dessamory, Agnieska Gratzka, Nick Aikens, Laurens D´Haenens. She is curator and writer, and cofounder/director of the curatorial institute FormContent.

She thought at various universities including Curatorial Studies KASK, Ghent, LUCA in Brussels, HISK, in Ghent and was a lecturer in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Vermoortel has written for various catalogues and magazines, such as Art Agenda and Metropolis M, and has edited publications including a.o., Cave#1: Territories (2016, Sternberg Press), It’s Moving from I to It (2014), The Responsive Subject (2011), and Out of the Studio (2008).

Olga Hatzidaki
Curator, locus athens
Online meetings 30 June

Olga Hatzidaki (1983) is a curator and cultural producer based in Athens, Greece. She holds a degree in Media, Communication and Culture from Panteion University in Athens and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London supported with a scholarship from Onassis Foundation.

Hatzidaki has been curating exhibitions and projects of various forms and formats in and around Athens during the last several years as locus athens, a nomadic curatorial scheme she is co-directing, interested in transformations and narratives in public space.

In 2019 she co-founded TAVROS, a non-profit art space in Athens, which aims to look closely at issues of equality, democracy and ecology with a strong focus on locality and community cultural practice.

Eriola Pira
Curator, Vera List Center
Online meetings 22 June

Eriola Pira is curator at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. Most recently, as Director of Programs, Pira led Art in General’s international collaborations, residencies, public events, and fellowship programs building on her professional networks and experiences as Program Director and Curator at the artist-founded NARS Foundation, as Program Director for The Foundation for Culture and Society, where she led an international network and artist exchange program with 11 countries in Central and Eastern Europe. She has presented exhibitions, talks, and collaborated with art institutions worldwide. Pira has an M.A. in Visual Culture Theory from New York University and is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Global Cultural Leadership Fellowship, and a Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship.

Ingel Vaikla
Curator, KAI Art Centre in Tallinn
26–28 February

Ingel Vaikla is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Brussels. In 2018–2019 Vaikla attended the postgraduate residency programme HISK in Ghent and recently started practice-based PhD studies in Audiovisual and Visual Arts at PXL-MAD, Hasselt.

Vaikla’s artistic research focuses on the relationship between architecture and its users, and the representation of architecture in photography, video and film. Vaikla’s works have been screened internationally at film festivals and art institutions such as IDFA in Amsterdam, CIAP Kunstverein in Hasselt, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, Tramway in Glasgow, Tretyakov gallery in Moscow etc. Vaikla has curated experimental film programmes with a focus on artists’ moving images for Tallinn Photomonth contemporary art biennial and for Narva Art Residency. She is currently film curator at KAI Art Centre in Tallinn.

Katia Krupennikova
Curator, V-A-C Foundation
8–11 January

Katia Krupennikova is a curator and art critic based in Amsterdam. She is a fellow at BAK, Utrecht a docent at HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht, and a part of the curatorial team at V-A-C Foundation, Moscow. In 2017—2019 she was one of the artistic core group members at Bergen Assembly, Norway.

Through her projects, Krupennikova attempts to transform existing social and political constructs into critical artistic models within which existing relations can be mimicked, criticized, distorted, displaced, and revised. In 2015, she won the Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition. The exhibition Post-Peace, intended to take place in Istanbul, was censored by the host institution; it subsequently opened in extended form at Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2017, and Nest, The Hague, 2017.

Her recent projects include Imogen Stidworthy. Dialogues with People, co-curated with Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2018–2019; and It Won’t Be Long Now, Comrades!, co-curated with Inga Lāce, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2017.