Talk "Which story does a biennial tell?" by Ekaterina Degot
On Tuesday, 15 April, at 6 pm Ekaterina Degot (Russia) will speak about her experience of a biennial / triennial curator in Ekaterinburg, Russia (2010) and Bergen, Norway (2012) and now of an artistic director of the Academy of Arts of the World in Cologne, Germany.
Ekaterina Degot is an internationally recognised theorist and curator in the fields of contemporary art and the politics of representation. Since 2008 she is senior editor of www.openspace.ru/art, an independent online magazine of art news, art criticism and cultural analysis. She is regularly contributing to Artforum and Frieze. Shows she has curated include Body Memory: Underwear of the Soviet Era (with Julia Demidenko; City History Museum, St Petersburg, 2000, City Museum, Helsinki, Volkskundemuseum, Vienna, a.o.); Moscow - Berlin 1950 – 2000 (with Juergen Harten a.o., Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the History Museum, Moscow, 2003 -04), Soviet Idealism (Musee de l’art wallon, Liege, 2005), Struggling for the Banner: Soviet Art Between Trotsky and Stalin (New Manege, Moscow, 2008), Citizens, Mind Yourselves: Dimitri Prigov (Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, 2008), If. Ukrainian Art in Transition (PERMM art museum, Perm, 2010). Together with Cosmin Costinas and David Riff, she curated the First Ural Industrial Biennial in Ekaterinburg under the title Shockworkers of the Mobile Image (2010). In 2013, she curated (with David Riff) the internationally greatly respected first Bergen Assembly, a triennial in Norway.
Her books include: Terroristic Naturalism (1998), Russian 20th-Century Art (2000) and Moscow Conceptualism (with Vadim Zakharov, 2005). She recently co-edited Post-Post-Soviet?: Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade (with Ilya Budraitskis and Marta Dziewanska, 2013). Since March 2014 the members of the Academy have elected Ekaterina Degot as the Artistic Director of the Academy of the Arts of the World for a 2-year-period. She lives and works in Moscow and Cologne.
The talk will take place at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. The centre is located at Alberta Street 13 (7th floor), Riga.