Bassam El Baroni
Bassam El Baroni is Assistant Professor in Curating and Mediating art at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. He was founding director of the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) a now closed non-profit art center in Alexandria, Egypt from 2005 – 2012 and co-curator of the 8th edition of Manifesta – the European Biennial of Contemporary Art – in Murcia, Spain, 2010. Other notable projects include curating the 36th edition of Eva International - Ireland’s Biennial, Limerick, 2014 and ‘What Hope Looks like after Hope (On Constructive Alienation)’ at HOME WORKS 7, Beirut, 2015.
Other exhibitions and projects include: 2014: Walid Sadek’s solo project Inside Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse at the Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen. 2012: When it Stops Dripping from the Ceiling (An Exhibition That Thinks About Edification), Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; 2009: Trapped in Amber – Angst for a Re-enacted Decade (with Helga-Marie Nordby), UKS, Oslo; 2008: Cleotronica 08, Festival for Media, Art, and Socio-Culture, Alexandria (EG); 2005–2006: You, Me, and The Trajectories of a Post-Everything Era, ACAF, Alexandria, and PROGR, Bern (CH); 2011: the publication Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou. He has led a number of intensive workshops, contributed texts to a variety of publications and delivered papers at a wide range of conferences and symposia including 2015: Sommerakademie Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland 2014: A Culture Beyond Crisis? Curating in a Time of Violence at CalArts – Geothe Institute, Los Angeles, USA 2013: The ‘After Year Zero’ Conference programme at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 2012: Museums Beyond The Crises – CIMAM Annual Conference, SALT, Istanbul; Beyond What Was Contemporary Art, Part Two, The 3rd FORMER WEST Research Congress, Utrecht (NL); dOCUMENTA (13), Cairo Seminar; Timing: On the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting, Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (DE); 2011: Global art, Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts; The Human Snapshot, Luma Foundation, Arles (FR). El Baroni is a PhD candidate in Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths, University of London.
El Baroni is a long-time member of the faculty at the Dutch Art Institute, teaching regularly at DAI in various capacities since 2013.
Bassam El Baroni's projects, seminars and symposia for DAI:
2017-2018 Proximity Aesthetics: Constructing New Ecologies of Practice
2016-2017 In Dialogue with Robotics
2016 ROAMING ASSEMBLY#5
2015-2016 Constructive Alienation and the Anti-Sublime
2014-2015 Before Art: the Problem of Abstraction and it's Contradiction