Extra Academy #33: Niels Van Tomme

04.12.2015, 17:30 — 21:30 Lecture

Free admission

English spoken

Niels Van Tomme (1977) is a curator and writer working on the intersections of contemporary culture, politics, and aesthetics. Currently associated with the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in Baltimore, he is the appointed curator of the 7th Bucharest Biennale, 2016. His exhibitions and public programs are shown at venues such as The Kitchen (New York), Värmlands Museum (Karlstad), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Gallery 400 (Chicago), and Akademie der Künste (Berlin). His curatorial endeavors have received grant awards from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Lambent Foundation, and The Nathan Cummings Foundation, as well as critical press in publications such as Afterall, Artforum, Art in America, Afterimage, and The Wall Street Journal. Van Tomme is a Contributing Editor at Art Papers magazine, while his writings in a wide variety of publications explore contemporary art, literature, and music in relationship to broader cultural developments. His books include Where Do We Migrate To? (2011), Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen (2014), and Aesthetic Justice: Intersecting Artistic and Moral Perspectives (2015), co-edited with Pascal Gielen.

About Extra Academy:

‘Extra Academy’ is the spontaneous alliance of Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen and the two art schools of the city, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Sint-Lucas Antwerpen. It involves close collaboration with a network of guests and students.

‘Extra Academy’ is a structural service ‘in progress’, offering different tools and trajectories as a supplement to – or disturbance of – academic models and reflexes. Its open program of lectures, performances, workshops, exhibitions and screenings is designed to trigger alternative questions about modes of knowledge production, of research and practice. It probes gaps and unexpected solutions, teasing out the point where ideas materialise, where they are confronted with their palpable consequences. It believes that theory is not an allegory of practice.

‘Extra Academy’ listens, looks, asks and wonders. It collects and distributes conversations, it inquires about the educational turn in the arts and about the turn that will dislodge it, while providing time and space for a plasticity of ideas to manifest themselves.

Language English

Location Kunsthal Extra City - Antwerpen-Berchem, Eikelstraat 25-31, 2600 Antwerpen