Curators’ Couch: Vera Mey & Philippe Pirotte

City Gallery Wellington is delighted to host Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte, who have been selected as co-artistic directors of Busan Biennale 2024 (South Korea). It is the first time the Biennale’s history that two people have been selected for the role. Mey and Pirotte are joined by City Gallery Wellington’s senior curator Aaron Lister, and the Director of The Dowse Art Museum Karl Chitham, for a conversation about collaborative curatorial approaches. Presented by Te Tuhi in partnership with City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi and the Dowse Art Museum.

Vera Mey

Vera Mey is an independent curator who recently completed her PhD at SOAS, University of London. Her doctoral research unpacks modern Southeast Asian art during the Cold War eras in Cambodia, Indonesia and Singapore, paying particular attention to intersections of racial plurality within regionalism. Part of this research fed into the co-curatorial framework of Spectres of Bandung: A Political Imagination of Asia-Africa, as part of The Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung’ organised by the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule, Frankfurt, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California. Prior to this, she worked as a curator both institutionally and independently, predominantly with artists with a revisionist approach to history.

She was part of the founding curatorial team of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, led by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (2014 – 2016), worked on the exhibition Anywhere but here (2016) at Bétonsalon – centre d’art et de recherche, Paris, and within the curatorial team of SUNSHOWER: Contemporary art from Southeast Asia 1980s to now, the largest survey of Southeast Asian contemporary art to be exhibited, at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo (2017). Her academic work includes the Getty Foundation scholar program Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art (2015-2016) and Art Schools of Asia with Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2021-2022). Mey co-founded the scholarly journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia (National University of Singapore Press). She has been appointed as Co-Artistic Director for the 2024 Busan Biennale.

Philippe Pirotte

An art historian, critic and curator, Pirotte is Adjunct Senior Curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). He held the position of rector at the influential Städelschule in Frankfurt and director of Kunsthalle Portikus between 2014–2020. He has served on the Documenta Commission (2019-2022), which selected ruangrupa as the artistic direction of Documenta 15 (2022). In 2016, Pirotte curated La Biennale de Montréal, titled Le Grand Balcon in reference to Jean Genet’s 1957 play Le Balcon, and was a member of the curatorial team of the Jakarta Biennale in 2017.

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