About

A curator, writer and art historian based in Paris, Kathryn Weir was Co-Artistic Director, Lagos Biennial 2021-2024, and teaches on contemporary curatorial and artistic practices, most recently at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome, and from 2024 in a Masters seminar at Sciences-Po, Saint-Germain. She was previously Artistic Director of the MADRE museum in Naples (2020-23) and Director of multidisciplinary programs at the Centre Pompidou (2014-20). In 2015 she created Cosmopolis, a platform for research-based, socially engaged and collaborative practices, and in 2017 established the annual festival MOVE: performance, dance, moving image, both at the Centre Pompidou. From 2006-14, she was Chief Curator of international modern and contemporary art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, and a member of the curatorium of the 5th, 6th and 7th Asia Pacific Triennials, as well as the lead curator of the major project 21st Century: Art in the first decade (2010-2011).
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Recent projects include Lagos Biennial 2024: refuge, Et si Carthage? Nidhal Chamekh (2024), Green Snake: women-centred ecologies (2023-2024), Jimmie Durham: humanity is not a completed project (2022-2023), Beauty and Terror: sites of colonialism and fascism (2022), Claire Tabouret: I am spacious, singing flesh (Collateral Event, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022), Clément Cogitore: Ferdinandea (2022), Rethinking Nature (2021-2022), Utopia Dystopia: the myth of progress seen from the south (2021- 2022), Collective Body (at Dhaka Art Summit 2020) and Cosmopolis #2 : rethinking the human (2019), Cosmopolis #1.5: enlarged intelligence (2018) and Cosmopolis #1: collective intelligence (2017). Her curatorial and writing practice engages with critical thinking on technology, gender, race, class and political ecology. Her teaching practice engages with art’s new pedagogies and its expanded geographies and histories.
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Publications include Beauty and Terror: sites of colonialism and fascism (2023), Rethinking Nature (2023), Utopia Dystopia: the myth of progress seen from the south (2023), Clément Cogitore: Ferdinandea (2023), Claire Tabouret: I am spacious, singing flesh (Mousse, 2022), Cosmopolis #1.5: enlarged intelligence (Centre Pompidou/ Mao Jihong Arts Fondation, 2018), Gorilla (Reaktion Books, 2013), Sculpture is Everything (QAGOMA, 2012), The view from elsewhere (Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 2009) and Modern Ruin (QAGOMA, 2008).