Alternativa curators appointed.
Save the dates May 25–27, 2012, for the press and professional preview in Gdańsk.
Wyspa Institute of Art
Ul. Doki 1/145B
80-958 Gdansk
Poland
www.wyspa.art.pl
www.alternativa.org.pl
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 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 powerful 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.
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.
