Talk

MA Curatorial Practice presents a talk with Daniela Zyman, Vienna-based writer, curator, and artistic director of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Zyman will discuss exhibitions she has made in relation to the current condition in Europe and how political discourse is increasingly stripping away the language of climate urgency, reframing environmental issues as threats to national identity or economic growth. This shift reflects the rise of nationalist and conservative agendas, which cast ecological concerns as elitist while amplifying militarism, anti-migration, and sovereignty-focused narratives. In response, curatorial practices and exhibitions are proposed as spaces for plural knowledge-making and critical reflection, offering alternative frameworks that connect climate, history, and justice to imagine more just and livable futures. 

Daniela Zyman is a Vienna-based writer, curator, and artistic director of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, based in Madrid, Spain. Since the founding of TBA21 in 2003, she has played a central role in shaping its program, curating over 50 exhibitions and contributing extensively to its publishing and commissioning initiatives. Her curatorial practice is rooted in material culture, artistic research, and ecological and post-disciplinary knowledge forms. She consistently engages with alternative epistemologies and speculative modes of world-making, positioning artistic research as a space of critical imagination and ecological thought. 

Previously, Zyman served as chief curator at the MAK–Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art in Vienna (1995 - 2001), where she co-founded the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2003, she was artistic director of the Künstlerhaus in Vienna and Director of A9 Forum Transeuropa. She holds a PhD in cultural studies and has lectured at institutions including the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2024, she published The Laughter of the Jellyfish (German edition, Walther König), a monograph that articulates a prefigurative, antagonistic approach to artistic research and traces a genealogy of emergent counter-methods.

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.