Argentinean curator Andrea Giunta will curate the mega-exhibition of contemporary art, which will be hosted in Porto Alegre from April 9 to July 5, 2020. The official announcement was made in a press conference in the morning of October 10, in Porto Alegre.
Porto Alegre, October 10, 2018 – In a press conference at the Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul, on Wednesday morning, 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 mega-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 (Buenos Aires, 1960) will explore, as the theme of this edition, the relation between art, feminism, and emancipation. The event was conducted by Renato Rizzo, president of the Administrative Council of the Biennial 12, and Gilberto Schwartsmann, CEO of the Mercosul Biennial Foundation and president of the Executive Board of the Biennial 12. “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 Schwartsmann. The title of the exhibition and the curating team will be revealed by the end of this year. 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.”
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 LatinAmerica 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 the main 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 Monterrey University (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), ¿Cuándo Empieza el Arte Contemporáneo? (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; She was co-curator for the exhibition Extranjerías, with Néstor Garcia Canclini, at the Museo Universitario 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.