Uni welcomes art writer and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Pictured (l-r) with world-renowned writer, curator and Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13) 2012 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, are Contemporary Art student Ella Dooley and Dr Alison Rowley from the University of Huddersfield
Wed, 28 May 2014 11:30:00 BST
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev pays her second visit to the University of Huddersfield as part of a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship
DURING April and May, the University of Huddersfield’s School of Art, Design and Architecture has twice been host to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, world-renowned writer, curator and Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13) 2012, who is now considered to be the most influential thinker in the contemporary art world.
Based in Rome and New York from 1999 to 2001 she was senior curator of exhibitions at MoMA PS1. She was the chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin from 2001 to 2008 (and interim director of the museum in 2009) and director for the 16th Biennale of Sydney in 2008. It has just been announced that she has been chosen to draft the 2015 Istanbul Biennial. She is also the author of Arte Povera, published by Phaidon Press in 1999.
Held every five years for 100 days in the German City of Kassel documenta is the most significant exhibition of contemporary art in the world today. Unlike other international exhibitions of contemporary art it did not grow out the nineteenth-century trade or world fairs of the colonial period, but emerged from the devastation of World War II. The first documenta, organised by Arnold Bode in 1955 in the shell of the Museum Fridericianum, almost destroyed by allied bombing raids on Kassel, was designed to reaffirm the role of art and culture in rebuilding civil society in the post-war reconstruction of Germany.
dOCUMENTA (13) 2012
A Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Leeds was a result of a successful collaborative bid to the Leverhulme Trust led by Professor Griselda Pollock, in association with Dr Alison Rowley (pictured right) at the University of Huddersfield.
Following the bid Professor Pollock, together with Dr Rowley, organised a six month programme of lectures, seminars and workshops with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, that commenced in December 2013.
The invitation to participate in the programme was offered to all postgraduate students and staff within the Schools of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield and the University of Leeds.
As keynote speaker at the School of Art, Design and Architecture Research Symposium, the writer and curator presented aspects of the dOCUMENTA (13) project involving artists working in Kabul, Afghanistan; a present-day situation of siege, collapse and recovery recalling the historical beginnings of documenta.
Her second lecture was devoted to her passionate interest in re-imagining the future of artistic practice, research and display beyond the traditional separation between the sciences and art, and involving a ‘worldly alliance’ between human and non-human forms of life so that both can flourish on the planet. In this she drew upon the thinking of feminist theorist and philosopher of science and technology Donna Haraway.
Perhaps the most important aspect of her second visit to Huddersfield was her work with third-year undergraduate students on the Contemporary Art course who were preparing for their final exhibition. Following a seminar with the students on her first visit in April, she spent two lively hours in the studios last Thursday talking to each one of them in turn about their choice of work for the exhibition and advising on its installation. What better conclusion could there be to studying professional practice and research in Contemporary Art than to have the degree show discussed by the number one curator in the world?
