Today KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin announced the appointment of Juan A. Gaitán as curator of the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.
Juan A. Gaitán at the opening of Material Information in Bergen. Photo: Dag Fosse
The 8th Berlin Biennale will take place in spring 2014.
Juan A. Gaitán (1973) is an independent writer and curator based in Mexico City and Berlin. He is trained as an artist and art historian at University of British Columbia and Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver (Canada).
Since the first edition in 1998, the Berlin Biennale has become a major international event for contemporary art. Located in the midst of Berlin’s vibrant cultural scene in the fast-changing capital of Germany, the Berlin Biennale has received an enthusiastic response from the audience as an experimental, forward-looking and contextual show. The previous seven editions of the Berlin Biennale explored a variety of exhibition formats and involved diverse curatorial agendas.
The Berlin Biennale has previously been curated by Nancy Spector and Hans Ulrich Obrist (1998), Uta Meta Bauer (2004), Maurizio Cattelan (2006) and Adam Szymczyk (2008) to mention a few.
Gaitán has recently curated the exhibition Material Information, currently on display in The West Norway Museum of Decorative Art and Gallery Format in Bergen. In November the third part of the exhibition will open in Hordaland Art Centre. According to Material Information’s website the exhibition ‘brings a set of contemporary practices together in order to present a multiple meditation on the new and old objects of industry.’
Juan A. Gaitán, Curator of the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.
Photo: © Anna Eckold
Gaitán has been a curator at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) from 2009-2011, and between 2011 and 2012 ha was adjunct professor in the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco (USA). During the 2006 – 2008 period, he was on the Board of Directors of the Western Front Society, and worked as external curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver. His writings have been published in several journals, including Afterall, Arte al Dia, Art Nexus, Canadian Art, The Exhibitionist, Fillip, and Mousse. His most recent exhibition, Material Information, spans three venues in Bergen (Norway), and looks for a renewed critical approach to the contemporary global distribution of labor from the perspective of arts and crafts. He is presently member of the acquisitions committee at FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunquerke (France).