A curatorial brainstorming session will take place on Friday September 17, from 10.00 until approx. 15.00 at Shanghai Gallery of Art, Three on the Bund, 3/F, 17 Guangdong Lu, near Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu during which the de Appel Curatorial Programme participants will present themselves and their past exhibition work from their respective contexts. Select Shanghai-based curators and art professionals will respond to their work and share their own curatorial past, present or upcoming work in lieu.
Six of the participants are from India, Canada, France, Argentina, Australia and the Netherlands. They will be traveling to South Korea (Gwangju, Seoul and Busan), Taiwan (Taipei) as well as China (Shanghai and Beijing) for their research trip. For many of them, it’s the first time visiting any of these countries.
Short biographies of participants 2010/09/17 (Alphabetical)
Mathieu Borysevicz, writer, curator, artist, filmmaker has recently been converted into gallery director at the Shanghai Gallery of Art. As a writer he has written widely on the contemporary arts of China, focusing on the intersections of social transformation and artistic production. Formerly ART FORUM’s editor in Shanghai, his writings have also appeared in Art in America, Tema Celeste, ART REVIEW, ARTAsia Pacific, Modern Painters, WORLD ART, and Yishu Journal. Several of his essays are featured in Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium as well as many exhibition catalogs and compilations. Borysevicz’s latest book project, ‘Learning from Hangzhou’, a semiotic analysis of urbanization in Hangzhou, China was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ‘Best Architectural Books of 2009.’ Borysevicz has also curated and consulted for numerous international venues and collections including Asia Society, MoMA NY, APERTURE, Walker Art Center, Mass MoCA, Jack Tilton Gallery, and DDM Warehouse, Shanghai. Borysevicz has also consistently exhibited and won awards for his own photo and video work. His work has been shown at venues such as ICA, London; the Bauhaus, Dessau; Jeu de Paume, Paris; The Storefront for Art and Architecture, NY; Mass MoCA; The Bronx Museum, NY; Center for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona; Israeli Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Today Museum of Modern Art, Beijing, etc. His work has been supported by grants from ART MATTERS, The Graham Foundation, and the Asian Cultural Council and is in institutional collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, NE among others.
Art critic, editor and director of Shanghai’s OV Gallery, Rebecca Catching has a background in East Asian studies and art history and is fluent in Mandarin. She has been following the Chinese cultural scene for the past nine years, working as an arts & entertainment editor for local culture magazine that’s Shanghai and freelancing for a number of international publications such as Art Asia Pacific, Art Review, Flash Art and the Far Eastern Economic Review. In July 2009, Rebecca took over as the director of OV Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in the French Concession. Since taking on the directorship, Rebecca has lead a challenging program working with established names such as Jin Feng, Qiu Anxiong, Zhang Dali and Ji Wenyu. She has also helped to create a platform for new and emerging artists such as Jiang Hongqing, Qian Rong, Su Chang and Gao Mingyan and has reached out to foreign artists living in Shanghai who often have few opportunities to show. Her shows at the gallery include “Make-Over,” “Re-visioning History,” and “Learning from the Literati.”
Biljana Ciric graduated from East China Normal University in Shanghai with a M.A in Art history. She was the director of the Curatorial Department at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art and the China networking curator for the 2006 Singapore Biennale. Her ambitious ongoing project Migration Addicts was presented at the 52nd Venice Biennale in the 2007 Collateral Events and in the Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. Her exhibition projects include Strategies from Within - Contemporary Art Practices in Vietnam and Cambodia (Ke Center of Contemporary Arts) and a major retrospective of Yoko Ono (Ke Center for Contemporary Art, Guangdong Museum of Art). Ciric was the curator of the public art project intrude 366 in 2008 and curated History in Making: Shanghai 1979-2009, 30 Years Retrospective of Shanghai Contemporary Culture in 2009. Her recent projects are Contemporaneity –Contemporary Art of Indonesia was presented at Shanghai’s MoCA and Body as a Museum at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm later this year. Currently she is working as an independent curator based in Shanghai.
Comfortable is an artist collective, based in Shanghai, set up in 2008 by five young artists, Gao Mingyan, Jin Shan, Li Mu, Lu Jiawei, and Tang Dixin. The artist group focuses, in a resourceful and facetious way, on the cultural conflict that is inherent to site specific ways of working as artists. Their projects often incite viewers to participate actively and to physically experience the works of art.
Jin Shan was born in 1977 in Jiangsu Province, China. He graduated from East China Normal University, Faculty of Fine Art in 2000. He now lives and works in Shanghai. Recently with his collective, he has responded to Van Abbemuseum’s collection by manipulating, copying, moulding and dropping works from the collection, laboriously adding further layers to the finished art objects.
Liu Yan is an advocate of cross-culture and cross discipline exchange, entrepreneur and community organizer. Her educational background is predominantly in Arts Management and Marketing with a breadth in cultural and creative entrepreneurial study and practices. As an independent consultant and lecturer in the Netherlands and China from 2004-2007, she served as advisory board member on cultural entrepreneurship for the city municipal of Utrecht, and worked as the advisor of the China program of Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, an international and interdisciplinary biennial that focuses on art, technology and society. Upon to her return to China in 2008, she co-founded 3S Media Center, an interdisciplinary center for art, media technology and academic research. Since then she has been organizing and chairing monthly gathering “3S ReUnion” to stimulate people from arts, technology and academic fields to meet and share their knowledge. In 2009, she co-founded the first coworking workspace - “Xindanwei” and worked as the curator and producer of numerous events in Xindanwei ever since. Translated as “New Work Unit”, Xindanwei is not only about providing a working space, but is also working to create a dynamic creative community for the freelance professionals and startups from China and overseas through a range of open events and inter-disciplinary collaborations. As they like to share, Xindanwei offers not only a workspace, but also a built-in network of creative professionals and entrepreneurs working in design, writing, technology, visual arts, and more.
Marie Frampier (b.1985, France) studied History of Art in Bordeaux and Rennes and graduated from the Sorbonne within the Professional MA programme “Exhibiting contemporary art “. Her research focuses on curating contemporary performance and with the experimental and performative nature of curating and art criticism. She was assistant curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC and editorial assistant at the contemporary art magazine Trouble. She regularly contributes to the magazine Critique d’Art.
Natasha Ginwala (b. 1985, Pune, India) has studied at the School of Arts and Aesthetics (JNU, New Delhi). She was selected as critic-in-residence for the PEERS ‘09 Residency at Khoj Studios and was assistant curator of Monsoon Festival IV – an interactive arts festival addressing climate change. In 2008, Natasha was part of the curatorial team for the exhibition Where in the World held at the Devi Art Foundation. She has also completed a post-graduate diploma in Broadcast Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai (2006-07).
Jacob Korczynski (b. 1979, Canada), is an independent curator based in Toronto, where he completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the Department of Film and Video at York University. He has curated projects for the Dunlop Art Gallery, SAW Gallery, Vtape, Gallery TPW and the Art Gallery of York University amongst others, and his writing has appeared in Prefix Photo, Ciel Variable, Border Crossings, C Magazine and Fillip. A former member of the Pleasure Dome collective, he was also the co-curator of Print Generation and From Instructions, the 22nd and 23rd editions of the Images Festival.
Javier Villa studied Art History at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Journalism at TEA, Buenos Aires. He has been working as a free-lance curator, artist and writer since 2005. He co-founded Rosa Chancho, an artist collective that ran an independent space from 2005 to 2006. Rosa Chancho has also developed several projects between the curatorial and the artistic, building different platforms for communal experiences over the past 5 years. He works as a Professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, where he also co-curated a series of three shows over a two year period with Guillermo Faivovich. He writes for La Nación newspaper and different cultural magazines. His curatorial practice focuses on designing experimental curatorial devices and new spaces for visual arts. He is interested in site-responsive projects and ritual experiences.
Rieke Vos studied Art and Architectural History at the University of Amsterdam and the Freie Universität in Berlin. Her thesis was titled ‘Citywalkers. The art of Janet Cardiff and Francis Alÿs’, on walking as art. In 2008 she started working as a researcher for the architecture firm Powerhouse Company in Rotterdam, where she engaged in an extensive research project on the economic crisis and its intricate relation to architecture called Rien ne va plus / Faites vos jeux. She was curator of exhibition Rien ne va plus that opened in September 2009 at the NAiM/Bureau Europe in Maastricht, editor-in-chief of the accompanying reader (published i.c.w. with A10 magazine) and curator of the related symposium organized at the Berlage Institute in June 2010. She is a visiting critic at the project space Lokaal 01 in Antwerp and writes for various magazines such as Mr. Motley, Tubelight and Nowishere. In her practice she combines her interest in contemporary art, urban studies and architecture.
Vivian Ziherl is a freelance art critic and curator born in Brisbane, Australia with degrees in Visual Art and in Peace and Conflict Analysis. In addition to her studies Vivian worked as a curatorial assistant with Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (2008-2009), as an arts journalist for the Australian Broadcast Commission (2005-2007) and with weekly reporting on grassroots political issues for anarchist radio (2003-2007). As an independent curator Vivian has organised several exhibitions in extra-institutional contexts including an inner-city bridge, a semi-trailer, a retail franchise network and online; as well as public-lectures, symposia, publications and commissions of new work. Vivian’s recent exhibitions have included works by Olaf Breuning, Ryan Trecartin, Igor Grubic and Jemima Wyman, as well as a screening co-curated in partnership with Electronic Arts Intermix (New York).
Leo Xu is associate director at James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai, and was director of Chambers Fine Art Beijing between 2007 and 2009. Prior to that, he worked as curator at Zhu Qizhan Art Museum and assistant curator at Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Xu contributes to many publications and journals, like Harper’s Bazaar, L’offciel Homme, Art China, Art World, Modern Weekly, Shanghai Times, Oriental Morning, City Pictorial, among many others. He runs an art column on Men’s Uno magazine. An artist of photography, Xu has exhibited at various venues, such as Pinyao International Photography Festival (Pinyao, 2005) and Mono (Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, 2005).
About Hosts
Based in Shanghai since 2006, Defne Ayas works as a director of programs to Arthub Asia, and as an art history professor at New York University in Shanghai. With Arthub’s Davide Quadrio, Ayas initiated and co-curated “Double Infinity,” a dynamic encounter with Van Abbe Museum’s collection (DCC, Shanghai, May, 2010), “The Making of the New Silk Roads,“ a highly acclaimed performative symposium featuring 35 artists, curators and scholars across Asia (BUG, Bangkok, August, 2009), “RMB City Opera“, a stage performance by Cao Fei (Artissima, Turin, November, 2009), and “Final Cut”, a city-wide new media festival featuring live performances by Christian Marclay, Feng Mengbo among others (Shanghai, Hengshan Park, in collaboration with Shanghai Cultural Development Foundation, 2008). Ayas is also curator of PERFORMA since 2004, the biennial of visual art performance with base in New York City, where she spends part of the year. Ayas worked extensively as a consortium liaison for Performa05, and Performa07 and since then, has presented more than fifty performances and performance-related programs with an international roster of artists such as Ahmet Ogut, Yeondoo Jung, Rabih Mroue, Dexter Sinister, Paul Elliman, Guido van der Werve, Qiu Zhijie and Xu Zhen. Ayas directed Performa09’s Writing Live program for emerging art critics; the biennial’s Architecture & City focus in NYC, and Performa’s Futurism related research seminars on architecture, graphic design, and noise music in China. Prior to joining PERFORMA, Ayas coordinated New Museum of Contemporary Art’s public- and new media- programming, including the exploratory inter-disciplinary roundtables for the Museum as a Hub initiative. (with Anne Barlow, 2005). Ayas has served and continues to serve as a curatorial/academic advisor and partner to Van Abbe Museum, Artissima, Turin; 8th Shanghai Biennial; 8th Gwangju Biennial; Artist Pension Trust, and CCA in Kabul, Afghanistan. Ayas completed De Appel Curatorial Training Program in Amsterdam and received her Masters Degree from the ITP at New York University.
Davide Quadrio after managing BizArt Art Centre in Shanghai the first not for profit independent creative lab in China for a decade, created in 2007 Arthub (www.arthubasia.org) a platform to support artistic endeavors in Asia. With BizArt and its team and now with Arthub, he organized hundreds of exhibitions, educational activities and exchanges in China and abroad, developing relationships with local and foreign institutions worldwide. Quadrio has been consulting Bund18 Creative Space (2005-2008) curating shows such as Vivienne Westwood’s Exhibition together with V&A, the Droog Design exhibition tour China (Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing) and the solo exhibition by Olivo Barbieri, Site-specific during the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. In the international arena he curated shows worldwide and most recently Artissima Cinema in the Museum of Cinema, Turin (with Defne Ayas, 2007/2008) and in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi with the show China! China!China which toured to Sainsbury Art Center (with Li Zhenhua, 2009). Davide organized a 5 days public art event for the Earts festival, October 2008 in heart of Shanghai, Xujiahui district. In 2009, following the financial crises, Davide creates an art production company called Far East Far West LTD to finance new artworks by artists in China and Asia (first production Cao Fei’s “RMB City Opera” in Turin, November 2009). On the cultural development side Davide has been working with ASEF and international governments consulting among others Pro Helvetia, the Foreign Ministry of the Netherlands, of Ireland and UK. Davide has been often invited by Universities such as Leiden University (the Netherlands), La Sapienza (Italy) and East Anglia University (UK), Academy of Fine Arts of Seoul (Korea), just to mention few for lectures, workshops and presentation. Articles by Davide appeared in various magazines, newspapers and catalogues worldwide, such as Yishu Journal, Flash Art, Artforum etc. and several academic publication due in 2009.
de Appel Curatorial Training Programme’ was initiated in 1994 by former director Saskia Bos, currently Dean of The School of Art at Cooper Union in New York. From the onset the course wished to bridge the gap between art historical education and ‘practice’ in the field of contemporary art by offering young curators a condensed package of experiences and skills which can be used as tools and instruments during the further development of their professional career.
Since 2006/2007 the curriculum of the programme, from then on entitled ‘de Appel Curatorial Programme’, has been reshaped under the guidance of director Ann Demeester and the new tutorial team. This e.g. implied a remarkable expansion of the tutorial team and an extension of the programme period to 8 months. Further changes included the introduction of a sequence of thematic workshops(ranging from ‘The History of Exhibitions’ to ‘Contemporary Project Management’) and the inclusion of a longer research trip to a destination outside Western Europe (in 2006/2007 a trip to New Dehli, Chandigargh, Calcutta, Bangalore and Mumbai under the guidance of artist Praneet Soi and advised by curator Grant Watson and Johan Pijnappel; in 2008/2009 a trip to Houston, New Orleans and Miami under the guidance of urban strategist Kai van Hasselt).
