5 Kurator:innen, 3 Tage, 31 Ateliers

Enriching encounters - and lasting impressions: Five curators from Germany, France, England and Austria visited a total of 31 Bremen artists in their studios in November 2023 as part of the Visiting Curators programme. Organised by Künstlerhaus Bremen for the sixth time, the project aims to enable artists to exchange ideas with curators from outside the local art scene. This allows them to gain and develop new perspectives on their own work or projects and to create multi-perspective networks.

“I really enjoyed talking to the artists about their practice, their dreams and their reality,” summarises Jes Fernie, freelance curator and author from Essex (UK) after her visit to Bremen.The guests in Bremen alongside Jes Fernie were the nationally and internationally active curators Adeline Lépine from France (director of the Crac - Centre régional d’art contemporain in Montbéliard), Lena Nievers from Austria (former head of the collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg), Agnieszka Roguski from Berlin (former artistic director of M.1 at the Arthur Boskamp Foundation in Hohenlockstedt) and Eric Golo Stone from the USA (former artistic director at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart). The curators were invited by players on the Bremen scene - this year the GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Museen Böttcherstrasse and Galerie Mitte at KUBO.

“The insights gained from these encounters are a valuable enrichment for my future artistic concepts and works, from which I can benefit in the long term,” says participating artist Clara Alisch about the programme. In the best-case scenario, concrete project ideas emerge that give the artists the opportunity to realise and make their work visible in different contexts outside of Bremen.Yevheniia Kriuk, Ukrainian guest artist as part of “Artists in Residence Ukraine” 2023 at Künstlerhaus Bremen, also took part in Visiting Curators. Guest curator Adeline Lépine, who organised the visit for her, appreciates the insight into the different ways of working: “[…] Bremen brings together personalities from all fields, with multidisciplinary practices that encourage discovery.”

Visiting Curators provides “new ideas, inspiration and encouragement” for artists, says participating artist Sibylle Springer. The visits also give the curators new insights into the infrastructure for visual arts in Bremen: different utilisation concepts in the studio buildings, funding opportunities and collaborations between artists, galleries, universities and other institutions in the city.These overlaps between all the personal and professional connections, media and spaces that become clear during the visits are particularly interesting, says Agnieszka Roguski.

• Cooperation

  Visiting Curators is a joint project of the Bremen Artists’ Association BBK, the Bremen Women Artists’ Association, GEDOK, the Künstler:innenhaus Bremen and the Städtische Galerie Bremen. All professional artists with a centre of work in Bremen who have completed their studies at an art academy or who can prove that they work professionally as an artist are invited to apply.

• Jes Fernie

  … is an independent curator, writer and lecturer based in Essex, UK. She is interested in the social, political and environmental context in which art is made, situated, and viewed. In 2021 she launched the Archive of Destruction, a long-term, international research project that brings together narratives around public sculpture that has been destroyed by rage, boredom, fear, greed and love. In 2023 she curated a contemporary sculpture exhibition at MK Gallery (Milton Keynes, UK) that explored the body’s newly configured relation to the world which involves increasingly fluid movement between binary systems, technology, human forms, animals, identities, and the environment. She often works with artists to develop texts, ideas and conversations.
(Proposed by Ele Hermel, Artistic Director, Galerie Mitte im KUBO)

• Adeline Lepine

  … is the director of the regional center for contemporary art in Montbéliard Le 19, Crac – Centre régional d’art contemporain since October 2022. Previously, between 2016 and 2022, she curated the Veduta programme, the experimental laboratory combining art, territories and their users, of the Biennale de Lyon. Following studies in art history and a number of experiences in the social field, Lépine had been working for various museums and art centres in France as a mediator, programmer and cultural engineer. In 2015 she had been one of the residents of the Capacete Residency in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Also involved as an artist or curator in various collective artistic projects (La Machine à Performer, Feminismo e Feijoada, etc.), Adeline Lépine aims for creating situations that encourage encounters between «alterities» (a work of art, an institution, an artist, people, different forms of life, etc.). Each project generates new experiences of dialogue, conviviality, reflection and (political, social and esthetical) actions based on the creative processes of the artists invited and the involvement of the place users to appropriate them.
 (Proposed by Annette Hans, Artistic and Managing Director, GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst)

• Dr. Lena Nievers

  … is curator and collection manager at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg since 2018, where she curates exhibitions and publications on 20th and 21st century art. She studied Art History and English at the University of Aberdeen and PhD in Art History with a dissertation on the work of Juan Muñoz at the University of Cologne. From 2008 to 2010 Nievers completed a Scientific traineeship, and worked as a scientific assistant at Kunsthalle Emden until 2012. From 2014 to 2018 she was Curator and worked in press and public relations at Galerie im Taxispalais (since 2017 TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol) in Innsbruck.
(Proposed by Dr. Frank Schmidt, Director, Museen Böttcherstrasse)

• Agnieszka Roguski

  … is the Artistic Director of M.1 Arthur Boskamp Stiftung and co-founded the transcuratorial collective A.R. practice. Roguski is a researcher, curator, and writer living in Berlin. Based on transdisciplinary methodologies, she focuses on performance and performativity, visual and (post-)digital cultures and ways to formulate transient, critical publics. In her PhD thesis “The Self on Display” (to be published soon), she investigated web-based practices of identification and disidentification in relation to the curatorial. In 2022, she was awarded the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art international research residency in Seoul.
(Proposed by Nadja Quante Artistic Director, Künstlerhaus Bremen)

• Eric Golo Stone

  … is currently artistic director at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart where he has organized exhibitions by Eva Barto, Niloufar Emamifar, Andrea Fraser, Flint Jamison, Anike Joyce Sadiq, Bea Schlingelhoff, and Ramaya Tegegne. His research, writing, curating, and lecturing consistently examines the political economy of art. His writing has been published in Afterall, FlashArt, October, and Texte zur Kunst, among other publications. He is editor of the newly released book, Services Working Group, published by Fillip, and with Rhea Anastas, Charles Gaines, and Jamillah James he is co-editor of the book The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (1993–2023), to be released 2023 from Dancing Foxes Press.
(Proposed by Nadja Quante Artistic Director, Künstlerhaus Bremen)

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