The curatorial team has recently been appointed for
the 2012 exhibitions of Alternativa in Gdansk.
Alternativa is a two-year pilot program aimed at
establishing a recurring large-scale, knowledge-based and politically
informed curatorial practice whose distribution will be through exhibition
aims, publications, workshops and radio broadcasts in the Gdansk Shipyard.
Leire Vergara, Ines Moreira,
Arne Hendriks and Alternativa Artistic Director,
Aneta Szylak, will work around the notion of materiality
for the 2012 edition, whilst Ewa Tatar and
Dominik Kuryłek will work from the Wyspa’s archives,
looking at early artistic practices that have influenced the stance and
forms of work being practiced at Wyspa Institute of Art today.
Krzysztof Gutfrański continues to work as a Head of
Publications at Alternativa Editions.
Leire Vergara is an independent
curator who lives and works in Bilbao. She is an editor and member of
Bulegoa z/b, an independent office for art and knowledge, recently opened
in Bilbao. From 2006 until 2009, she worked as chief curator at Sala
Rekalde, Bilbao. During this period of her curatorial practice, she paid
special attention to the production of commissioned projects that
encouraged new ways of transcending the limits of the white cube. She also
developed a strong commitment to art education through various
conferences, workshops and meetings that were pivotal to the exhibitions
programme. From 2002 to 2005, together with Peio Aguirre, she co-directed
the independent art production structure D.A.E (Donostiako Arte
Ekinbideak) with its base in Donostia-San Sebastián. She has contributed
as a writer to a number of art and cultural magazines and catalogues. She
is a PhD student on the Curatorial/Knowledge programme, in the Visual
Cultures department at Goldsmiths College, London.
Inês Moreira is an architect,
researcher and curator based in Portugal. In her work she has experimented
with collaborations between architecture, contemporary art and
speculative/oblique research on contemporary culture. In recent years she
has been developing curatorial research on space, under the title
“Performing Building Sites: curatorial research in/on space”, which
proposes a critical epistemology in the field of curatorial
studies—working within the Curatorial/Knowledge research Group, the Visual
Cultures Department, Goldsmiths College. She was Cultural Programmer of
Architecture for the European Capital of Culture 2012, in Guimarães,
Portugal, and Deputy Programmer for Art+Architecture (from February 2010
to March 2011). She is now curating a number of projects interfacing
architecture and cultural studies. She coordinated the Laboratório de Arte
Experimental of Instituto das Artes/Ministério da Cultura, Lisbon
(2003-05); was co-founder of the independent art group Plano 21 Associação
Cultural, and part of the team of Terminal Project (2005…); she is also
the founder of the experimental curatorial project petit CABANON (2007…);
and resident curator at Museo Extremeño Iberoamericano de Arte
Contemporâneo in Badajoz, Spain (2007…). Inês has been collaborating with
Universidade do Porto since 2006, where she curates events and designs
exhibitions (Depósito 2007, Pack 2007, Mapa 2007, Rescaldo e Ressonância!
2009). She was co-curator of the public gatherings of Evento2009, Public
Art Biennial, Bordeaux, France.
Arne Hendriks is an artist and
curator from Amsterdam. His practice is based on speculative modes of
research in the grey areas between design, art, history and science. His
recent projects include The Incredible Shrinking Man, speculative research
into the implications of downsizing the human species to 50 centimeters,
The Instructables Restaurant, the world’s first fully open-source eatery,
The Repair Manifesto, investigating and reviving the art of repair, and
Hacking IKEA, on the personal customization of consumer products (in
cooperation with Platform21). His most recent research project On the
Ruins of Work explores what work is, what it has been, and what it could
become.
Aneta Szylak is a curator and art
theorist, co-founder and currently director of the Wyspa Institute of
Art—an intellectual environment for contemporary visual culture in the
former Gdańsk Shipyard, and Vice-President of the Wyspa Progress
Foundation. Her projects are characterized by insingtful responses to
cultural, political, social, architectural and institutional peculiarities
and include in 2010 Estrangement (with Hiwa K) at The Showroom, London,
2009; Over and over again 1989–2009, at Wrocław Centennial Hall, 2008;
Translate: The Impossible Collection at Wyspa; Chosen in Digital Art Lab
in Holon (Israel), in collaboration with Gali Eilat, 2006; Ewa Partum: The
Legality of Space at Wyspa, and the group show, You Won’t Feel a Thing: On
Panic, Obsession, Rituality and Anaesthesia in Kunsthaus Dresden with
Artur Żmijewski; Selected Works at Wyspa. Earlier projects include:
Dockwatchers (2005, Wyspa), Palimpsest Museum (2004, Łódź), Health &
Safety (2004,Wyspa), Architectures of Gender (2003, Sculpture Center, New
York. She has lectured at many art institutions including Copenhagen
University, Bard College, New School University, Queens College and NYU,
both in NYC, and worked as a guest professor at the Akademie der Bildende
Kunste in Mainz, Germany. She is about to complete her PhD at Goldsmiths
College, London.
Ewa Małgorzata Tatar and
Dominik Kuryłek are art historians and critics, editors
and curators who have worked collaboratively since 2003. Interested in
institutional critique and curating as a methodology of art history, they
have realized a number of exhibitions together, as well as publications
such as Guidebook (2005-2007) and Paulina Ołowska’s Café bar (2011) at the
National Museum in Krakow. To date and in total, they have published
around 200 texts in the press, anthologies and
catalogues.
Krzysztof Gutfranski is a curator
and art historian. He is the curator of Studio and Kitchen—an open space
at Znaki Czasu CCA in Torun. He has collaborated with Warsaw’s New Culture
Foundation Bęc Zmiana as a curator of the interdisciplinary art/science
series Expectative, editor of the liberal arts quarterly Format P. He is
also co-curator of the Hell of Things project in Bytom, at Kronika CCA
(2009), as well as curator of the Athletic Cinema research program at
Galeria Entropia, Wrocław. He has published texts in various web and
printed magazines and several other publications. Gutfranski specializes
in innovative forms of art publication.
Alternativa 2010–2012 is a joint initiative of Wyspa
Institute of Art, City of Gdansk and Gdansk 2016, with committed funds
from the City of Gdansk and European Union.
