Mercosul Biennial announces curatorial team for the 8th edition

Pablo Helguera, the curators will be meeting in Porto Alegre for the first time on September 23-25, to work on development of the Curatorial Plans and visit the proposed exhibition spaces for the 8th Mercosul Biennial: the Quayside Warehouses, Usina do Gasômetro, Santander Cultural and MARGS – The Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art. A few days before their meeting in Porto Alegre, the curators will be attending the opening of the 29th São Paulo Biennial on September 21.

The curatorial proposal for the 8th Biennial will address territoriality from geographical, political and cultural perspectives, and include notions of locality, territory, mapping and frontier; Mercosul as a geopolitical construction; supranational organisations in the region, and the city of Porto Alegre as a place to be discovered and activated through art. This theme will be applied to the exhibitions and other action strategies, and will also run through the Education Programme. The programme for realisation of the Biennial is in viability and budget phase. The educational actions are soon to be defined, together with the date for public presentation of the complete curatorial concept.
Curator profiles

José Roca – chief curator. Born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1962. He graduated in architecture (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), specialised in Critical Studies (Whitney Independent Study Program, New York) and holds a master’s degree in the Design and Administration of Cultural Buildings (Ecole d’Architecture Paris-Villemin, Paris). He is 47 years old and works in Bogotá (Colombia) and Philadelphia (USA). He ran the artistic programme at the Banco de La República, Bogotá, for ten years and transformed it into one of the most respected institutions on the Latin American circuit. Roca was co-curator of the 1st Poli/grafica Triennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2004), the 27th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2006), the Encuentro de Medellín MDE07 (2007) and Cart[ajena], a series of urban interventions in Cartagena, Colombia (2007). He was a jury member for the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). Also in 2011, Roca will be heading the curation of an exhibition of the Rio Grande do Sul artist Regina Silveira at the Iberê Camargo Foundation, in Porto Alegre/RS. Other recent curatorial projects include: Muntadas: Informação, Espaço, Controle, to be shown in 2010 at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; Välparaíso, a series of interventions in Valparaíso, Chile (2010); Otras Floras, at Galeria Nara Roesler in São Paulo, Brazil (2008); Phantasmagoria: Espectros da Ausência, a touring exhibition organised by iCI and the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República (2007-2009); Botánica Política, at the Sala Montcada, La Caixa in Barcelona, Spain (2004) and Traces of Friday: art, tourism, displacement, at ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA (2003). He is currently artistic director of Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious – a festival of contemporary graphic art taking place in various exhibition spaces in Philadelphia.

Pablo Helguera

Education curator. (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. His work as an educator intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record. Pablo Helguera performed individually at the Museum of Modern Art /Gramercy Theater, in 2003, where he showed his work “Parallel Lives”. His first musical composition, “Endingness” was performed in New York by the Orchestra of the Americas. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Royal College of Art, London; 8th Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05, Havana; Shedhalle, Zurich; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Brooklyn Museum; IFA Galerie, Bonn; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; MALBA museum in Buenos Aires, Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo in Mexico City, The Bronx Museum, Artist Space, and Sculpture Center. His work has been reviewed in Tema Celeste, Art in America, Artforum, NY Arts Magazine, ArtNews, amongst others. In 2008 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and also was the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant. Helguera worked for fifteen years in a variety of contemporary art museums, most recently as head of public programs at the Education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998-2005), where he organized close to 500 public events and worked in the development of nearly 30 exhibitions. Since 2007, he is Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is the author of eight books: Endingness (2005), an essay on the art of memory; The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2005; Spanish edition; 2007, English edition), a social etiquette manual for the art world; The Witches of Tepoztlán (and other Unpublished Operas (2007), The Boy Inside the Letter (2008) Theatrum Anatomicum (and other performance lectures) (2008), the play The Juvenal Players (2009) and Artoons 1 and 2 (both from 2009), a collection of cartoons about the Art World.

Alexia Tala

Adjunct curator. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1966, she lives and works in Chile and is also visiting lecturer at art institutions in England. She has a Master of Arts from Camberwell College of Arts. She was co-curator for the first Deformes Performance Biennial (Chile, 2006), co-curator for the Museum Man’s exhibition Historia de la Desaparición (Franklin Furnace archives - Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda, Chile, 2007) and curator of Focus Brazil no Chile (2010). She writes for art magazines in England and is author of Installations and Experimental Printmaking (United Kingdom, 2009). Her research into contemporary artists using experimental print techniques for making installations discovered a rapidly expanding movement in England and the rest of the world.
Cauê Alves

Adjunct curator. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1977, he lives and works in São Paulo. He is a Brazilian curator and lecturer on the Art: history, criticism and curatorship course at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. He is curator of the Clube de Gravura at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and member of the editorial board for Número magazine. He was a member of the Arts Advisory Board for MAM-SP (2005-2007). Curated exhibitions include MAM[na]OCA: arte Brazileira do acervo do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2006); Quase líquido, Itaú Cultural (2008) and Da Estrutura ao Tempo: Hélio Oiticica, at Instituto de Arte Contemporânea (2009). He is currently preparing a solo exhibition about Mira Schendel (2010) and will be one of the curators for the Panorama da Arte Brasileira at MAM (2011).
Paola Santoscoy

Adjunct curator. Born in Mexico City in 1974, she lives and works in Mexico. She was curator of the first Biennial of the Americas in Denver, Colorado (USA), entitled “ La Naturaleza de las Cosas”, and has curated exhibitions in various exhibition spaces in Mexico City, including La Panadería (2000-2001), Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (2001-2003), and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (2004-2007). In 2005, together with Willy Kautz and Sebastián Romo, she began the 111 (one day, one artist, one work) project. Exhibition projects include: Todo va a estar bien (2004); Jesús Rafael Soto, Visión en Movimiento (co-curated with Tatiana Cuevas); Come closer (2005); Outside In, Robin Minard (2006). She has worked on curatorial projects and essays for international institutions such as Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, Germany), Fundación Proa (Buenos Aires, Argentina), GAMeC (Bergamo, Italy) and Piano Nobile (Geneva, Switzerland) and regularly contributes to contemporary art publications. In 2007 and 2008, she was curator of the Solo Projects section at Arco contemporary art fair in Madrid, Spain.
Fernanda Albuquerque

Assistant curator. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1978, she lives and works in São Paulo and Porto Alegre. She is a journalist, curator and art critic, and is taking her doctorate in Art History, Theory and Criticism at PPGAV/UFRGS, where she also took her master’s degree. She was visual arts curator at Centro Cultural São Paulo – CCSP from 2008-2010 and is currently working for the 29th São Paulo Biennial education programme (2010). She also works on the art criticism group at Paço das Artes (2007, 2008 and 2010) and in the educational courses and publications area at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, (since 2006). In 2009, she took part in the Courants du Monde visual arts and cultural policy training programme in France, offered by Maison de Cultures du Monde in partnership with the French Ministry of Culture. She has published articles and interviews in magazines such as Contemporary Magazine (London), Exit Express (Madrid), Número (São Paulo), Tatuí (Recife) and Aplauso (Porto Alegre). As curator, she coordinated the CCSP Artistas Convidados do Programa de Exposições 2009, developed the Vandeluz project for the 7th Mercosul Biennial (2009) and, in partnership with other curators, organised the exhibitions Sinais de fumaça (2009) and Passagens secretas (2008), at CCSP, and Campo coletivo (2008), at Centro Universitário Maria Antonia. She was part of the Arte e Identidade Cultural na Indústria project organised by SESI-RS (2007-2008). In 2010, she served on the selection committee for the EDP na Artes, award offered by Instituto Tomie Ohtake. She was on the selection panel for Conexões Artes Visuais/MinC/Funarte/Petrobras in 2007. She worked as visual arts editor for Aplauso magazine from 2002-2005 and as intern and website editor for the Iberê Camargo Foundation from 2001-2003.