Marta Kuzma
Curating Workshop
From 14th to 21st September 2013
Curator and theorist of contemporary art, Marta Kuzma was born in the United States into a Ukrainian family. she graduated in Art History and Political Economics from the Barnard College, Columbia University, NY, and completed her specialisation in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Centre for Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University in London. She was co-curator together with M. Gioni of the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Manifesta 5, in San Sebastian, Spain, in 2004. Prior to accepting her first mandate as director of the Office for Contemporary Art in Norway (OCA) in 2005, she had worked for around 18 years in the field of contemporary culture. She was artistic director of the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, founding director of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Kiev, director of the international exhibition programme at the International Center of Photography in New York, under the guidance of Cornell Capa. She has taught in many prestigious institutions and collaborated with publications such as Radical Philosophy, Afterall, Artforum, Art Review, Flash Art and Mousse.
As Director of the OCA, in 2009 she took part as a member of the commission for the Nordic Pavilion in Venice, and negotiated the first cooperation project in history between Denmark and Norway, leading to the project of Elmgreen and Dragset. She is a member of the Publishing Committee of Afterall, and since, 2009, she has served as a temporary professor at the Department of Art & Design at the IUAV University of Venice.
OCA OFFICE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NORWAY
The Office for Contemporary Art of Norway is a foundation created by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Norwegian Foreign Affairs in Autumn 2001, with the aim of strengthening the position and the contemporary production of visual arts in Norway, as well as stimulating and facilitating the exchange between Norwegian and international institutions and arts professionals. The OCA sets out to explore synergies between the artistic and the academic world, and to act as a forum for the production of the intellectual discourse on art and culture through a range of different activities. The OCA offers financial support to allow curators and non-profit institutions to feature Norwegian artists, curators and critics within exhibitions and other professional contexts. The aim is to introduce Norwegian art in the dialogue on innovative artistic production as part of the range of contemporary cultural practices.
The OCA makes residency programmes available abroad for Norwegian artists, curators and critics; it also offers a range of programmes for non-Norwegians, in which participants are called upon to take part in the local arts scene and to establish exchanges with the artists and other professionals from the country. Verksted is a programme launched in 2003 as a series of publications and seminars, which has grown ever more since then. Today it covers a range of themes, including philosophy, aesthetics and contemporary cultural production, addressed through conferences, workshops and exhibitions.
