Gala Celebration and Award Presentation in New York City
April 17, 2019
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College is pleased to announce that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, has been selected as the recipient of the 2019 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. For the past 20 years, the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence has celebrated and awarded the individual achievements of a leading curator or curators whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive of exhibition-making today. The award will be presented to Christov-Barkargiev by Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo at a gala celebration and dinner co-chaired by Lonti Ebers and Martin Eisenberg on April 17, 2019 in New York City, and will once again be given under the name of patron Audrey Irmas, who has bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of USD 25,000.
"Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is a singular force within the field of contemporary exhibition making. Her far-reaching ideas and bold commitment to artists making new and ambitious works is equally matched by her exploration of artistic histories and their re-presentations. Her remarkable dOCUMENTA(13) was undoubtedly one of the great exhibitions of our time." -Tom Eccles, Executive Director, CCS Bard
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (b. 1957, Ridgewood, New Jersey, United States) is an Italian and American author, an organizer of events and exhibitions, and a researcher of artistic practices, the histories of art, and the politics of aesthetics and multispecies co-evolution. She is the director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti in Turin and is currently completing the expansion of the museum to incorporate the Cerruti Collection (May 2019). Additionally, she is Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University (2013–ongoing).
Previously, she was senior curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate in New York, from 1999 to 2001; the chief curator at Castello di Rivoli (2002-08); the artistic director of the 16th Biennale of Sydney, Revolutions—Forms That Turn in 2008; the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13) which took place in 2012 in Kassel, Germany, as well as in Kabul, Afghanistan; Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt; and Banff, Canada; the curator of the 14th edition of the Istanbul Biennial (SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms) in 2015 and, in 2016, she became the first person to simultaneously direct both of Turin’s two art institutions, the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (2016-17) where she organized exhibitions such as Organismi (2016) and Colori (2017).
As a writer, she has been interested in the relations between historical avant-gardes and contemporary art and has written extensively on the Arte Povera movement, such as in her book Arte Povera (Phaidon Press, 1999). She published the first monograph on the work of South African artist William Kentridge (1998–99), and the first monograph on Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, including works done in collaboration with George Bures Miller (2001). She has organized exhibitions with and written books on Fabio Mauri (1994), Alberto Burri (1996), Franz Kline (2004), Pierre Huyghe (2004), Giovanni Anselmo (2016), Ed Atkins (2017), Anna Boghiguian (2017), Wael Shawky (2017), Nalini Malani (2018), and Hito Steyerl (2018-forthcoming).
She has lectured widely at art and educational institutions and Universities for the arts andphilosophy, including the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Cooper Union, New York; Cornell University, Ithaca; Monash University, Melbourne; Di Tella University, Buenos Aires; University of Leeds; the University of Frankfurt; Harvard University, Boston; and MIT, Boston.
The gala and award presentation will take place at 666 Fifth Avenue (entrance on 53rd Street), New York City. Event location has been provided by Brookfield Properties with additional generous support from Lonti Ebers.
For more information please contact Ramona Rosenberg at T 845 758 7574 or rrosenberg [at] bard.edu, or see our website. To purchase tickets online please click here.
