Renée Ridgway

Renée Ridgway is an artist, free-lance curator, writer and educator based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since completing her studies in fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute (MA), she has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and internationally (Manifesta8, P.S.1 MoMA Hotel New York, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Museum De Lakenhal, Gouda Museum, Conflux Festival), made numerous public presentations at various conferences and forums and taught at several universities in the Netherlands and abroad. Besides her work as a visual artist, Ridgway organises 'Negotiating Equity' (http://negotiatingequity.net) at the DAI, (Dutch Art Institute), master's curriculum that addresses collaborative curation- investigating experimental and conceptual art practices under physical as well as virtual conditions. Ridgway is co-initiator and contributor to n.e.w.s. (http://northeastwestsouth.net), a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activities.

As an artist Ridgway's work incorporates a range of media in her installations: video, audio, texts, textile, drawings along with contributions and feedback from many of her collaborators. In 2010 for Manifesta8, together with Rick van Amersfoort she presented 'Migrating Democrazy', a 10-minute TV broadcast for Spanish TV that can be seen as a frenzied cartography on the perception of borders. Her ongoing 'Beaver, Wampum, Hoes' project- a series of mixed media installations and public interventions at various locations in and around NYC and the Netherlands in 2000-2011 focuses on the value of the contemporary 'cultural currency', in relation to the Dutch colonial past (US, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname, etc.). The most recent installment was in Kerala, India, at David Hall,  (February 2012) and Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague from October 22, 2010 to February 13, 2011. Ridgway has completed residencies at Art3, Valence (1999), Hotel New York, P.S.1. MoMA (2000), European Atelier Programme, Weimar (2000), Künstlerhaus Bethanian, Berlin (2003), Sculpture Space (2005) and Pilotprojekt Gropiusstadt, Berlin (2008) while working in China, France, U.S. Canada and India on site-specific projects.

Ridgway's most recent exhibition, public intervention and publication, TheRelevation of the Concealed, Politics (in)forms: Freedom of Information Act Results (WOB/FOIA) was at Onomatopee January 20-April 7, 2012. The 'special cover' 64-page publication is available at Onomatopee (http://www.onomatopee.net/project.php?progID=a26eba64bcae87f77579821bbacc53c8&PHPSESSID=a2a54668a3cb7f366632d0efed0d2160), with contributions by Freek Lomme, Simon Ferdinando and Rick van Amersfoort.

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