Talk

The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, founding chair of MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Andris Brinkmanis is a Riga-born curator, critic, and academic whose practice is situated between exhibition-making, pedagogical work, and critical theory. Based in Brunate and Milan, he is a senior lecturer and the course leader of the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA in Milan, and visiting professor for the Art Academy of Latvia Curatorial Course and a PhD candidate at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg (HDK-Valand) in partnership with NABA. His research explores the intersections of curatorial practice, alternative education, and visual culture, with a strong emphasis on research-led and socially engaged methodologies. His curatorial projects include South&Porosity (Instituto Italiano per gli studi filosofici, Naples, 2024); Recombinant Ecologies (PAV, Turin, 2024); Over Exposed (Museo Irpino, Avellino, 2023); Panoptic Garden, a one week intensive public program for the Pavilion of Uzbekistan at the Venice Biennale, with Sara Raza (Venice, 2022); Infancy and History (OCAT, Beijing 2019); Signals from Another World. Asja Lācis and Children’s Theatre (AVTO, Istanbul 2019); Asja Lācis. Engineer of the Avant-Garde (Latvian National Library, 2019); Starting from the desert Ecologies on the Edge with Marco Scotini (2nd Yinchuan Biennale, Yinchuan, China, 2018); Mei Lan Fang and the Soviet Theatre (Research project for The Szechwan Tale. Theatre and History (First Anren Biennale, Anren, China, and Milan, 2018); Signals from another world. Asja Lācis Archives (Documenta 14, Kassel 2017); and Disobedience Archive (The Park) with Marco Scotini (SALT, Istanbul, 2014, and in twenty different iterations between 2007 and 2025). Brinkmanis has been also engaged with the Central Asian Pavillion for the 54th and 55th Venice Biennales as a commissioner and coordinator. He is a co-editor of the 2021 book, Asja Lācis. L’agitatrice rossa. Teatro, femminismo, arte e rivoluzione, and contributes regularly to international art journals and critical platforms. Through his interdisciplinary approach, Brinkmanis has emerged as a leading voice in rethinking the role of art education and exhibition-making in shaping civic and cultural consciousness.

In his presentation, Brinkmanis will reflect on selected research projects and exhibitions, including his long-term work on the Latvian theater director, educator and revolutionary Asja Lacis, and the philosopher Walter Benjamin. He will also introduce his current PhD project, “Pedagogies of Care,” that explores how collective and emancipatory pedagogies can be activated through curatorial, artistic, and educational practices, foregrounding learning based on attention, dialogue, and listening. It also proposes to explore teaching as a curatorial practice, as he has been practicing it during the recent years through various site-specific workshops tailored for contexts such as at WHW Akademija In Zagreb in 2024, the online platform Museum of Care, David Graeber Institute, Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies Course at NABA in Milan, and the Savvaļa/Savage Summer school for the Art Academy of Latvia curatorial program students.