Annette Maechtel (nGbK): Curating Infrastructures
Talks on Curatorial Practice @ Radialsystem
In 2020 I started as the managing director of the nGbK, a basic democratic Kunstverein which lost its space and funding two years later. The institution had a white cube gallery space in Oranienstraße/Kreuzberg since ages. I saw this situation as a chance of a spatial and structural transformation. I tried to align my knowledge from research, cultural-political activism and most of all my curatorial practice with the challenges and chances of rethinking the infrastructure of the institution. In my talk, I would like to focus on the questions, which came up in this situation of an institution on the move: What kind of spatial infrastructure allows a process-oriented, collaborative and participatory curatorial practice to develop further? How to build up a sustainable infrastructure for an institution being in motion?
All talks held in English.
Free admission.
This talk takes place at Radialsystem (Holzmarktstraße 33, 10243 Berlin) and online via Zoom.
Annette Maechtel holds a PhD degree in Art History/Cultural Studies and works as a freelance curator and project manager in Berlin. Since 2020 she is the managing director of the Kunstverein neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst in Berlin. Several of her exhibition and research projects have dealt with Berlin as a political and discursive space. Among others, the city of tomorrow - contributions to an archaeology of the Hansaviertel Berlin 2007 at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Together with Heimo Lattner, she was editor of ibid. scenic readings from documents of Berlin urban and cultural policy from 2015-2019. From 2011 to 2016 she was an active member of Haben und Brauchen, an activist group dealing with cultural politics in Berlin. From 2017 to 2019 she was a scient. collaborator in the Einstein research project Autonomy and Functionalization - a cultural-historical-aesthetic analysis of art concepts in the visual arts in Berlin from the 1990s to the present at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2018 she completed her dissertation at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig at the Institute for Theory with a focus on the infrastructure of curatorial and collective practices in the early Nineties in Berlin. In 2020, it was published by b_books under the title Das Temporäre politisch denken. Spatial production in Berlin in the early 1990s. She has been a member of the Rat für die Künste Berlin since 2020 and of the advisory board of the Berlin Project Fund for Urban Practice since 2022. Since 2023 she has been appointed to the jury for art in public space in Vienna for three years, focusing on infrastructures, spatial strategies and collective practices.