Andrea Giunta appointed chief curator of Biennial 12

In a press conference on October 10, the Mercosul Biennial of Visual Arts Foundation officially announced the name of the chief curator for the Biennial 12. Argentinean curator Andrea Giunta will curate of the exhibition of contemporary art that will occur in Porto Alegre, from April 9 to July 5, 2020, at the Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul, the Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul and the Santander Cultural. A curator, writer, teacher, and researcher, Andrea Giunta will explore, as the theme of this edition, the relation between art, feminisms, and emancipation.

“The curator’s proposal approaches the complex issues involved on the theme, both on the exhibition and on the program of activities that will be developed during the next two years. It is a Biennial that presents huge challenges, since it approaches an urgent issue for art and society”, said Gilberto Schwartsmann, CEO of the Mercosul Biennial Foundation and president of the Executive Board of the Biennial 12.

The title of the exhibition and the curating team will be revealed in the next months. The first activity of the Biennial 12 was also announced during the press conference: a seminar featuring the curator that will occur on November 6, within the official schedule of the 64th Porto Alegre Book Fair.

Regarding her nomination, Andrea said: “Biennials are privileged spaces to analyze the state of the world of art. The theme of this edition is in the center of the debates and critic reviews of the art canon. Porto Alegre is an ideal city to operate as a resonance box and activating device of an urgent issue. The Biennial intends to unite radical positions, to approach them from an international and Latin-American perspective, and to contribute to an active map of the political transformation of subjectivities in the contemporary world.”

About Andrea Giunta (Buenos Aires, 1960)
Andrea Giunta has a wide experience in Latin-American art on the international field, in exhibitions, essays published on specialized magazines and exhibition catalogues, teaching and academic research. Her fields of interest include 20th and 21st century art from Latin-America and the world. She is the author of several works regarding Latin-American art, memory and politics, the power of images—in particular Picasso’s Guernica—and the relation between art, gender, and feminism in Latin America.

She is Principal Researcher of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina and a Professor of Latin-American and International Art at the University of Buenos Aires. She was Chair in Latin American Art History and Criticism, at the University of Texas, in Austin, where she was also Founding Director of the Center for Latin-American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). She was a Visiting Professor at Duke University, in Durham (NC), Visiting Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Autonomous National University of Mexico, and Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University (NYC), among other academic works. She lectured at museums and universities such as MoMA (NYC), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Hamburger Bahnhof Museum (Berlin), Harvard University, University of California (Berkeley), Chicago Art Institute, Princeton University, and New York University.

Andrea is the author of several books, such as Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics, Argentine Art in the Sixties (Duke University Press), Poscrisis (Siglo XXI), Escribir las Imágenes (Siglo XXI), Objetos Mutantes (Palinodia), When Does Contemporary Art Begin? (ArteBA), and El Guernica de Picasso (Biblos). Her most recent book, Feminismo y Arte Latinoamericano, was published in 2018 by Siglo XXI. She was the curator of the León Ferrari Retrospective, hosted at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, in Buenos Aires, and at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; co-curator for the exhibition Extranjerías, with Néstor García Canclini, at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC-UNAM), in Mexico; and co-curator for Verboamérica, with Agustín Pérez Rubio, at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba) – Fundación Costantini. Currently, she is the co-curator for the exhibition Radical Women. Latin American Art, 1960-1985, with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill hosted by the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, at the Brooklyn Museum (NYC) and at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.
 

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