/News

New members join the documenta 14 team

documenta 14 is organized by Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk together with a team whose first members were announced in October 2014. This team has been now joined by new members, among them:
Paul B. Preciado as Curator of Public Programs, Sepake Angiama as Head of Education, Clare Butcher as Education Coordinator, Arnisa Zeqo as Education Coordinator, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung as Curator at Large, Natasha Ginwala as Curatorial Advisor, Candice Hopkins as Curatorial Advisor, and Jill Winder as Online Editor.

Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher, curator, and transgender activist, and one of the leading thinkers in the field of gender and sexual politics. An Honors Graduate and Fulbright Fellow, he earned an M.A. in Philosophy and Gender Theory at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he studied with Agnes Heller and Jacques Derrida. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. His first book, Contra-Sexual Manifesto (forthcoming publication by Columbia University Press in 2015) was acclaimed by French critics as “the red book of queer theory” and became a key reference for European queer and transgender activism. He is the author of Testo Junkie. Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics(The Feminist Press), and Pornotopia (Zone Books), for which he was awarded the Sade Price in France. He has served as Head of Research at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) and Director of the Independent Studies Program (PEI). He teaches Philosophy of the Body and Transfeminist Theory at Université Paris VIII-Saint Denis and at New York University.

Sepake Angiama is an educator and curator whose interest revolves around critical, discursive education practices and the “social framework.” Previously, Sepake served as Director of Education for Manifesta 10, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Curator of Public Programmes at Turner Contemporary, Margate, England, and Public Programmes Coordinator at the Hayward Gallery, London. She has devised education programs for a number of leading international institutions, including Tate Modern, Hayward Gallery, London, and Frieze. Her curatorial and education projects include film commissions of British artist John Smith, Horizon (Five Pounds a Belgian, 2012),What can we achieve together? (2009-2012); Centre for Cooperative Living (2010) and What can you achieve by getting to know your neighbour?, a collaborative publishing project […] at the PUBLIC SCHOOL in Brussels (2010); The Tourist(2009), an exhibition and project with Åbäke; the collaborative project Office of Real Time Activity (2009); and Drawn to Dance (2005) at the Hayward Gallery, London.  Sepake earned her M.A. in Contemporary Art Curating at the Royal College of Art, London, where she received the Monique Beudert Award for her exhibition project.

Clare Butcher is a teacher and curator from Zimbabwe, who cooks as part of her practice. She arranges reading, writing, and research sessions with students at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Piet Zwart Institute’s Masters of Education in Art & Design program. Her own education includes an MFA from the School of Missing Studies in 2015, a Masters in Curating the Archive from the University of Cape Town in 2012, and participation in the de Appel Curatorial Programme in 2008/09. Other collaborative and individual endeavors include a position as guest curator with the Van Abbemuseum, where she served as co-curator of the Autonomy Project (2010–12); Men Are Easier to Manage Than Rivers (2015); Historical Materialisms (2014–);Every Great Undertaking Has Its Ups And Downs (2014); Scenographies (2013); The Principles of Packing… on two travelling exhibitions (2012); and If A Tree… on the Second Johannesburg Biennale (2012).

Arnisa Zeqo is an art historian. After an initial involvement with poetry and literature, she studied Art History and Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on the work of Marcel Duchamp. In her first teaching position, she taught ethics at the University of Maastricht. In 2011 she co-founded rongwrong, a space devoted to art and theory in Amsterdam, which aspires to bring together artistic practices and reflective discourse on an intimate platform. At rongwrong, a series of exhibitions was complemented by tea parties, gossip sessions, marathone readings, activist proclamations, and poetry discussions. In her curatorial educational work she has collaborated with institutions such as the Piet Zwart Insitute Master of Fine of Arts (2013), Werkplaats Tipografie (2014), and the Stedelijk Museum (2014). In 2015 she was Curator in Residence at Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, where she wrote the conceptual essay “Lets spit on Szeemann.”

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, PhD is an independent curator and biotechnologist. He is the founding director of SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin and Editor-in-Chief of SAVVY, a journal for critical texts. Recent curatorial projects include If You Are So Smart, Why Ain’t You Rich? On the Economy of Knowledge,Marrakesh, 2014 (P. Doutreluingne); Giving Contours to Shadows, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Gorki Theater, Gemäldegalerie, SAVVY Contemporary as well as satellites in Dakar, Johannesburg, and Nairobi, 2014 (E. Agudio, S.J.v. Rensburg);but the sea kept turning blank pages looking for history – on the state of refugeeness, SAVVY Contemporary, 2014; the discursive program – Wir Sind Alle Berliner: 1884-2014, ICI Berlin, 2015 (S. Kobschall, A. Jäger, S. Njami); Satch Hoyt: Riding Celestial Vessels, Galerie Wedding, 2015; and Emeka Ogboh: No Food for Lazy Man, Galerie Wedding, 2015. He is co-curator with S. Ovesen of An Age of our Own Making for Images Biennale 2016 in Holbæk, Roskilde, and Copenhagen. Upcoming projects for 2016 incl. The Incantation of the Disquieting Muse – On Divinity, Parallel- and Supra-realities or the Exorcisement of ‘Witchery’ and The Conundrum of the Imagination – on the paradigm of exploration and discovery. Selected lectureships at Fondation Gulbenkian Paris, 2013; Tyler School of Art Philadelphia, 2014; Haverford College, 2014; Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, 2014; CuMMA Discourse Series, Aalto University Helsinki, 2015. As adjunct professor, he lectured on Post-/decolonial Theory and Art to the class of Prof. Antje Majewski at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel.

Natasha Ginwala is a curator, researcher, and writer. She is curator for the 8th edition of CONTOUR Biennale  (2017). Recent projects include My East is Your West featuring Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana at the 56th Venice Biennale; Mind Moves Matter at L’ appartment 22, Rabat; Corruption…Everybody Knows with e-flux journal, SUPERCOMMUNITY issue. She was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (with Juan A. Gaitán) and curated The Museum of Rhythm at Taipei Biennial 2012 (with Anselm Franke). From 2013–15 she led the multi-part curatorial project Landings presented at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, David Roberts Art Foundation, NGBK (as part of the Tagore, Pedagogy, and Contemporary Visual Cultures Network), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other partner organizations (with Vivian Ziherl). Ginwala trained in Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU in New Delhi and participated in the de Appel Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam (2010-11). She has written on contemporary art and culture and has contributed to numerous publications.

Candice Hopkins is Chief Curator at The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has held curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Western Front, and the Walter Phillips Gallery. Hopkins’s writings on history, art, and vernacular architecture have been published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, Revolver, New York University, Fillip Review, and the National Museum of the American Indian, among others. She has lectured widely, including a keynote presentation with Hetti Perkins on the “sovereign imagination” for dOCUMENTA (13). She is co-curator of the exhibitions Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years; Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art; and the 2014 SITE Santa Fe Biennial exhibition Unsettled Landscapes. Hopkins has co-edited the books Recipes for an Encounter (Western Front) and Jimmie Durham: The Second Particle Wave Theory (Walter Phillips Gallery Editions and Art Editions North).

Jill Winder is a writer and editor who studied political theory and holds an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. From 2007 to 2011 she was Curator of Publications at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, where she served as co-founding editor of BAK’s Critical Reader series and on the research team of the FORMER WEST project. Winder has been awarded research and writing fellowships from the Institute of Current World Affairs and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and has edited and co-edited numerous artists’ monographs and critical readers. She was also managing editor for the publications of the 7th and 8th Berlin Biennales (2012/2014). Most recently, Winder worked as Head of Research and Publications for Bergen Assembly (2012–13) and Editor-in-Chief of art-agenda (2012–14). She is based in Berlin.

Read more about documenta