Here are the members of the Curatorial Advisory Circle:
João Laia, Chief Curator, Kiasma – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
Steven Learner, Creative Director, Collective Design, New York
Nana Oforiatta Ayim, Founder, ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Accra
Florence Ostend, Curator, Barbican Art Gallery, London
Fabian Schöneich, Curator and Writer, Berlin
BIOGRAPHIES
João Laia is chief curator for exhibitions in Kiasma – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. Among the recent exhibitions that Laia has curated are mentioned In Free Fall (2019) at CaixaForum, Barcelona; Vanishing Point(2019) at Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon; Drowning in a Sea of Data (2019) and Transmissions from the Etherspace(2017) at La Casa Encendida, Madrid; foreign bodies (2018) at P420, Bologna; 10000 Years Later Between Venus and Mars (2017-18) in Porto City Hall Gallery; HYPERCONNECTED (2016) at MMOMA – Moscow Museum of Modern Art; And Hybridize or Disappear (2015) at MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon. Laia co-curated the 19th and 20th edition of the contemporary art festival videobrasil (2014–18) at SESC Pompeia, São Paulo. He has organized other exhibitions, performance and screening programs at CCCB – Xcèntric (Barcelona), Galeria ZDB and MAAT – Museum for Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), DRAF – David Roberts Art Foundation, Delfina Foundation, South London Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery (London), Parque Lage (Rio de Janeiro), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Kurzfilmtage – International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and CAC – Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius). Between 2012 and 2013 Laia participated in the CuratorLab research master in Konstfack, Stockholm, and in 2014 she participated in the curatorial residency of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. She edited A Multiple Communities (SESC publishing, 2018), co-edited the monograph by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané entitled Spiral Forest (Mousse Publishing, 2018) and writes for magazines such as Flash Art, frieze, Mousse, Spike e Earthquake.
Steven Learner is an architect, interior designer, and curator based in New York. Since 1996, his eponymous architecture and interior design firm has designed buildings and interiors for clients such as Christie's, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Sean Kelly Gallery that have been featured extensively in trade magazines. The projects he has completed for private clients include homes for important artists, collectors and gallery owners and a personal museum of a well-known contemporary art collection. In 2013 Learner founded Collective Design, creating the first modern, vintage and collectible design fair in New York. Through its innovative and experimental format, the fair made it possible to make contemporary trends in collecting explicit and created a platform for presenting numerous galleries and young design studios to a broad and interested audience. In his role as Creative Director, each year Learner has shortlisted exhibitors and commissioned installations from renowned contemporary designers including Gaetano Pesce, Hella Jongerius and Nendo, as well as cultural institutions including Noguchi Museum, Design Academy Eindhoven, Storefront for Art and Architecture and Cranbrook Academy of Art. Over the next few months, Learner will be attending many conferences discussing contemporary design.
Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a writer, director and art historian. Through her work, she has sought to understand the peculiarities of cultural contexts, and sought to voice that research in a way that is relevant both to local actors and communities, and to the world at large. Oforiatta Ayim is director of ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge, with which she initiated the Pan-African Cultural Encyclopedia, reimagining the narratives that cross and concern the continent; and the Mobile Museums project which goes into communities, collects their material culture and exhibits it for these same communities, thus creating a dialogue on the importance of narratives, memory and value. You have lectured extensively on the concept of cultural storytelling and the establishment of organizations in Africa, at institutions such as the British Museum and Cambridge University. Oforiatta Ayim has written for magazines like frieze e African Metropolitan Architecture, and will publish his first novel,The God Child, by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2019. He has also made a number of films, which combine fiction, travel narrative and documentary, and which have been shown in museums such as The New Museum, Tate Modern, and LACMA. Oforiatta Ayim was awarded with the Art & Technology Award by LACMA in 2015; with the AIR Award, which “aims to honor and celebrate outstanding African artists who are committed to creating bold, innovative, and socially relevant work”, in 2016; and with the inaugural Soros Arts Fellowship in 2018. She was named by Apollo as a member of the '40 under 40' list; by The Africa Report as a member of the 50 African Trailblazers list; from Okayafrica as a member of the 12 African women making history list; and as Quartz Africa Innovator; she and is also the 2019 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University.
Florence Ostend is Curator at Barbican Art Gallery, London. You recently curated exhibitions Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art (Barbican, London), Daria Martin: Tonight the World (Barbican, London), The Japanese House: Architecture and Life After 1945 (Barbican, London), dioramas (Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt), A Propos de Nice: 1947-1977 (Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice), Ugo Rondinone: I Love John Day (Palais de Tokyo, Paris) e Pierre Huyghe: +/- (The Artist's Institute, New York). She was Adjunct Curator at Dallas Contemporary (2011-14) and taught art theory and exhibition history at the University of Art and Design (HEAD), Geneva (2013-15). You have written for numerous catalogs and publications. She is a member of the art committee of Fluxus Art Projects, London.
Fabian Schöneich is a curator, writer and editor living in Berlin. From 2014 to 2018 he was curator at Portikus, Frankfurt, where he organized solo and group exhibitions with Minouk Lim, Ade Darmawan, Jana Euler, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Shahryar Nashat, Amy Sillman, and Moyra Davey, among many others. She worked as an assistant curator at Kunsthalle Basel from 2012 to 2014 and curated the 2013 and 2014 Performance Projects at LISTE Art Fair Basel, which included performances by Aki Onda and Akio Suzuki, Adam Linder, Anne Imhof, Ligia Lewis, and Alexander Baczyński-Jenkins. In 2011 Schöneich co-organized the exhibition and program “Melanchotopia” in her role as assistant curator at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. From 2012 he worked as advisory curator for SALTS exhibition space, Basel/Birsfelden, and from 2015 to 2017 as advisor for the Focus, Frame, and Live sections of Frieze art fair in London and New York. He recently edited the complete monograph of the artist duo Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel entitled “Body of Work” as well as the monograph of Ade Darmawan entitled “Magic Center”.
