Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents the eighteenth edition of the Young Curators Residency Programme Torino
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo announces the curators selected for the eighteenth edition of the Young Curators Residency Programme Torino (February – May 2024): Jiayue He (China), Aigerim Kapar (Kazakhstan), Andria Nyberg Forshage (Sweden). The coordinator and tutor of the eighteenth edition is Michele Bertolino.
The curators were selected by a jury composed of Francois Piron, curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Zasha Colah, artistic co-director of Ar/Ge Kunst, Bozen and curator of the 13th Berlin Biennale, Berlin.
The Young Curators Residency programme consists of a research residency in Italy that has the dual objective of developing the professional and critical skills of the young curators selected, while aiming at spreading knowledge of the Italian art scene on an international level. The residency provides the opportunity for the three selected candidates to get in contact and work with Italian artists, and furthers the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s commitment to the national contemporary art as well as its engagement with emerging curatorial practice. The in-depth research process, which sees the curators visiting over 200 artists’ studios, museums and art institutions across Italy under the guidance of a reference Italian curator, culminates in an exhibition curated with the support of the team of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Now in its 18th edition, the Young Curators Residency programme is still a unique example in Italy and a renowned project internationally, thanks to the quality of the training provided and the outstanding practice pursued by the alumnae and alumni who, in many cases, hold prominent positions in museums and institutions.
The selection of participants takes place in collaboration with the most renowned international programs for curators: Royal College of Art, London; Graduate Program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York; Curatorial Program, De Appel, Amsterdam; CuratorLab, Konstfack University of Arts, Stockholm; Independent Study Program, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MFA Curating, Goldsmiths University of London; MA Curatorial Practice, California College of the Arts, San Francisco; MAS/CAS Curating, Zurich University of the Arts; Universität für Angewandet Kunst, Wien. Furthermore, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has decided to involve new institutional subjects as promoters of the candidacies, with the aim of achieving ever greater representativeness on the international scene. In 2021 a strong collaboration with the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai was settled. Through the establishment of a curatorial committee responsible for the nominations, RAM proposes candidates from East and Southeast Asia. For the 2024 edition, the committee – led by X Zhu-Nowell, artistic director, and coordinated by Tiantian Xu, curator – is composed of Alia Swastika, Esther Lu, Merv Espina, Wang Weiwei, and Sabih Ahmed.
Starting from this year, the Fondazione has established a partnership with ICI to nominate alumni of their Curatorial Intensive for the YCRP, opening the program to Africa-based curators for the first time. Founded in 1975, ICI produces exhibitions, events, publications, research, and professional development opportunities for curators and other audiences around the world. Since 2010, ICI has provided emerging curators from around the world with unique professional development opportunities through the Curatorial Intensive. The program has taken place internationally in more than 25 cities, and since 2013 annually in Africa, in Addis Ababa, Accra, Cape Town, Dakar, Kampala, Johannesburg, and Marrakech.
The residency will end with an exhibition at Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, the historic headquarters of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Guarene (CN). The preparation of the exhibition is preceded by the study of bibliographic material and the dialogue with artists, curators, gallery owners, collectors, and museum directors from the most relevant cultural production centers throughout Italy.
Curators
Jiayue He is a curator, mediator, and researcher based in the UK and Shanghai. Her research focuses on understanding the infrastructures of public cultural institutions, exploring how cultures and artifacts are institutionalized, collected, displayed and further influence people’s perceptions and knowledge systems. Central to her curatorial values is a commitment to emphasize the situations and scenarios of individuals who, for various reasons, find themselves lost in translation amidst dominant histories and institutional exhibition-making processes.
She completed her master’s degree in Curating Contemporary Art in 2023 at the Royal College of Art, London. Her graduation dissertation focused on problematising the complexity of care by discussing the perceptions of contemporary art curating and UK-based institutional practices. While studying at the Royal College of Art, Jiayue co-founded the Backitchen curatorial collective, a group dedicated to unpacking the historical and social construction of ‘Asian’ and exploring the potential of Asian art and its social intervention and identities. The group has curated solo artist and group shows at prominent organizations, including the Venice Arsenale, Behavan Gallery, and Liquid Gold Studios in London.
In her forthcoming project at Staffordshire Gallery, London, where she collaborates with two artists, she works as the project curator, exploring the notion of contemporary archives and seeking diverse ways for individuals to connect with their roots and claim their identities through collective creativity.
Aigerim Kapar is an interdependent curator, interdisciplinary researcher, decolonial practitioner and eco-art activist in Kazakhstan.
Kapar founded Artcom Platform, a Central Asian community-based contemporary art and public engagement organization in 2015. Grassroots-driven agenda in Central Asia matters to her curatorial practice. With her team at Artcom Platform, Kapar curates and organizes collaborative knowledge production, public art and science education, art interventions, and research-based exhibitions. Collective memory, practices of care, nomadic heritage, environmental justice, urban accountability, and future generations are cross-cutting in all their processes and activities. She has also been organizing Art Collider, a school where art meets science bringing communities together, since 2017. Currently, Aigerim Kapar curates long-term projects of care, engagement and advocacy for lake ecosystems in Kazakhstan: SOS Taldykol, Care for Balkhash. In 2020, she united Central Asian artists, cultural practitioners, and researchers to initiate and co-create the place for contemporary art and culture of Central Asia - Steppe Space - a hybrid reality project.
Her key previous works are Re-membering: Dialogues of memories, an international intergenerational project in memory of survivors and victims of 20th-century political repressions in Kazakhstan (2019), and Time&Astana: After Future, an urban art research and engagement project (2017-2018).
Andria Nyberg Forshage (she/they) is a writer, poet, curator and artistic researcher. Their work concerns trans and queer aesthetics, perception, desire and survival in between, outside, or against established frames. She is a Contributing Editor of Paletten Art Journal. In 2022-23 they were a participant of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of the Arts, Stockholm, engaging with the 4th Autostrada Biennale in Prizren. The same year she collaboratively curated Another Possible Inner Exterior Moment To Moment Nonlocation Location at Konsthall C in Stockholm, part of an ongoing project on transfeminist ways of un/making worlds and sense. They have given lectures on their research in many academic contexts, art institutions, and other spaces. Her writing—genre-queer and trans-disciplinary, critical and experimental—features in several art publications, poetry journals, and performances, as well as in anthologies including a forthcoming peer-reviewed reader on Queer Death Studies.
Coordinator
Michele Bertolino (he/him) is a curator and researcher living between Turin and Rome. He currently collaborates with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo as coordinator of the Young Curators Residency Program. He is the curator of Porpora – a photographic book of Lina Pallotta’s work. He curated exhibitions in several institutions, among those: NYU, New York; MAMbo, Bologna; Last Tango, Zurich; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino. In 2020 he was visiting lecturer in the LAB.ZONE PETROLIO, class led by Lili Reynaud-Dewar at HEAD Genève. Between 2019 and 2021 he worked as assistant curator of the 2020 Art Quadriennale FUORI, held at Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In 2018-2019 he was Junior Curator at The Institute of Things to Come with which he continued collaborating in 2020-2021 as curator of the research project "Guerrilla against the Uncessing Hostilities of the Livings". In 2016 he founded with Bernardo Follini, Giulia Gregnanin and Sebastiano Pala, the curatorial collective Il Colorificio. His writings have been published in Nero Magazine, Flash Art and other magazines. In 2022 he published Albe e tramonti in Praiano*, written together with Giulia Crispiani. He graduated in philosophy of art at the University of Turin and in 2015-2016 he participated in CAMPO15, a course of curatorial studies and practices of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation.
