Convening

What Protocols Are Needed Now?

Curators and activists, jury members for the 2020-2022 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, convene for a conversation on the protocols they enact in their artistic and professional practice and the urgency for equitable protocols now.

Panelists 
Ivet Ćurlin, curator, WHW, Kunsthalle Wien
Natasha Ginwala, curator, Gropius Bau; Artistic Director of Gwangju Biennale 2020 
Candice Hopkins, Senior Curator of the Toronto Biennial of Art
Carin Kuoni, curator and VLC director
Tamara Oyola-Santiago, public health educator and activist
Shuddhabrata Sengupta, artist, Raqs Media Collective 

2020-2022 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Announcement

The recipient of the 2020-2022 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice and the four Jane Lombard Fellows will be announced with leading artists and practitioners in the field of art and social justice gathering from around the world. Candice Hopkins, jury chair, will announce the recipient of the prize with jury citation, followed by a live acceptance speech. 

The Vera List Center Forum 2020 launches the center’s 2020-2022 focus theme, As for Protocols. It is curated by Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira and organized and convened with the support of Adrienne Umeh, Heran Abate, Joshua van Biema, and Maryna Arabei.

 The Vera List Center Forum 2020 is made possible by major support from Jane Lombard and the Kettering Fund, as well as the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The New School as well as members of the Vera List Center’s board and other individuals.

Ivet Ćurlin is a member of the Zagreb-based curatorial collective WHW (What, How & for Whom), along with artists Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršic. WHW, which takes its name from its 2000 exhibition dedicated to the 152nd anniversary of The Communist Manifesto, runs Zagreb’s Galeria Nova, where it collaborates with cultural organizations to promote intergenerational discourse around the politics of art. WHW has also curated exhibitions at the Technical Museum, Zagreb; Apexart, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; and the 11th Istanbul Biennial. Currently, Curlin and WHW members Ilić and Sabolović serve as joint directors of The Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna.

Natasha Ginwala is a curator and writer. She is Associate Curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin and artistic director of COLOMBOSCOPE, Colombo. Ginwala has curated Contour Biennale 8, “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium” and was part of the curatorial team of documenta14, 2017. Other recent projects include “Arrival, Incision. Indian Modernism as Peripatetic Itinerary” in the framework of “Hello World. Revising a Collection” at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2018; “Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future” at ifa Gallery Berlin and Stuttgart, 2018; “My East is Your West” at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015; and “Corruption: Everybody Knows…” with e-flux, New York, 2015. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2014, and co-curated “The Museum of Rhythm” at Taipei Biennial 2012 and at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2016–2017. From 2013–2015, in collaboration with Vivian Ziherl, she led the multi-part curatorial project “Landings” presented at various partner organizations. Ginwala writes on contemporary art and visual culture in various periodicals and has contributed to numerous publications. She is a recipient of the 2018 visual arts research grant from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. She is a 2019 recipient of the Graham Foundation Grant, and nominated Chimurenga, recipient of the Vera List Center’s 2018-2020 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Politics.

Candice Hopkins is a curator and writer originally from Whitehorse, Yukon, and a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation. She is Senior Curator of the Toronto Biennial of Art. Most recently co-curator for SITE Santa Fe’s 2018 Sitelines Biennial and the Canadian Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennial, Hopkins has developed major international exhibitions including Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada (2013), Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years Plug In ICA (2011), and documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens (2017). She has been published widely and lectured internationally and is the recipient of the 2015 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. She was a participant in the Vera List Center’s Indigenous New York! seminar series.

Carin Kuoni is a curator and writer whose work examines how contemporary artistic practices reflect and inform social, political, and cultural conditions. She is assistant professor of visual studies and senior director/chief curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. She has curated numerous transdisciplinary exhibitions, and is editor/co-editor of Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America (1996); Considering Forgiveness (2009); Entry Points: The Vera List Center Field Guide on Art and Social Justice (2015); Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (2017); Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies Into Darkness (2021), among others. The recipient of a 2014 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship, she directed SITAC XII: Arte, justamente in Mexico City in 2015, and was a Travel Companion for the 57th Carnegie International in 2018.

Tamara Oyola-Santiago is a public health educator and activist who specializes in harm reduction. After earning graduate degrees in Public Health and Latin American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Oyola-Santiago joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a Presidential Management Fellow. Since 2009, she has been part of The New School, working with students to mobilize for social justice, equity and liberatory practices of education. Areas of life work include harm reduction services grounded in social justice in Puerto Rico and New York City, HIV/AIDS de-criminalization, self-determination and anti-colonial practices, Queer liberation and LGTBQIAGNC health. She is co-founder of Bronx Móvil, a fully bilingual (Spanish-English) mobile harm reduction and syringe services program that strives for drug user health and empowerment. She is also part of the What Would an HIV Doula Do collective, a community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS Crisis.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist, writer, curator, and member of Raqs Media Collective, a group whose work sits at the crossroads of historical research, philosophical inquiry, and contemporary art. Raqs has exhibited widely, including at Documenta, the Venice, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Shanghai, Sydney and São Paulo Biennales, and received the Multitude Art Prize in 2013. In 2000, Sengupta co-founded the Sarai Initiative at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi and the Sarai Reader Series, which he co-edited until 2013. He was the 2015-2016 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Program at Bard College, and has lectured at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.