Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev  is a writer and curator based in Rome, Turin and New York. She is currently Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Italy. Previously, she organised exhibitions as an independent curator in Europe and was Senior Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center – a MoMA Affiliate from 1999 to 2001. In 2001, she was a jury member of the 49th Venice Biennale.

Interested in the relations between historical avant-gardes and contemporary art, she has written extensively on the 1960s Arte Povera movement. Her book Arte Povera was published by Phaidon Press in 1999. She published the first monograph on the work of South African artist William Kentridge, which accompanied Kentridge’s first touring retrospective exhibition (Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Serpentine Gallery, London; MACBA, Barcelona) in 1998–1999, and the first monograph on Canadian artist Janet Cardiff (P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2001), as well as a monograph on the work of Pierre Huyghe (Skira, Milan, 2004).

As an independent curator, she organised exhibitions including Molteplici Culture, Rome, 1992, and Il suono rapido delle cose, a homage to John Cage, co-curated with Alanna Heiss for the Venice Biennale in 1993. As part of the curatorial team for Antwerp ’93: European Capital of Culture with Iwona Blazwick and Yves Aupetitallot, she devised the international survey exhibition On taking a normal situation and retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present at the MUKHA in Antwerp (1993). In 1997, she organised Citta-Natura, a city-wide exhibition of international artists including Lawrence Weiner, Giovanni Anselmo, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Willie Doherty, Gary Hill and Mark Dion, held in Rome in museums and public spaces, including the zoology museum to botanical gardens. She then co-curated with Laurence Bossé and Hans Ulrich Obrist, La Ville, le Jardin, la Memoire at Villa Medici in Rome (1998–2000) which included new projects by over 100 artists ranging from Janet Cardiff and Olafur Eliasson to Cai Guo Qiang and Natascha Sadr Haghighian.

As Senior Curator at P.S.1 – a MoMA affiliate – she was an initiator and co-curator of Greater New York in 2000, a collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art that marked a generation of new art from the United States, with over 120 artists included. She then curated a historical exhibition on international art in the 1980s, Around 1984: A Look at Art in the Eighties (2000). She also organised solo shows of Georges Adeagbo, Santiago Sierra, Michael Rakowitz and Nedko Solokov. In 2001, she curated the first retrospective exhibition of Janet Cardiff ’s works, including collaborations with George Bures Miller and the group exhibition Animations that explored the ways artists around the world today – from Pierre Huyghe to Damian Ortega – are using animation, both returning to the early twentieth century utopian beginnings of the medium or approaching high-tech software programs.

She was appointed Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum for Contemporary Art in January 2002. Her first project at the Castello was Matrix.2 by Francis Alÿs, an automated answering system for the museum (2002). In 2003, she organised the group show The Moderns / I moderni, which explored new modernist perspectives in the works of younger visual artists and sound artists from around the world.

For the Castello di Rivoli, she curated a second survey exhibition of works by William Kentridge in early 2004, an exhibition which toured throughout 2004–2005 to the Kunstmuseum K20 in Dusseldorf, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg. This was followed by a solo exhibition of works by Pierre Huyghe in 2004. In 2004, she also organised a survey of works by American postwar artist Franz Kline, which was followed in 2004–05 by the group exhibition Faces in the Crowd / Volti nella folla, co-curated with Iwona Blazwick, an exhibition exploring figuration as an avant-garde practice from Édouard Manet to Anri Sala, Song Dong and Destiny Deacon through paintings, sculptures, installation, photography, film and video works by over 100 artists from 1873 to today.

In 2005, she co-curated with Francesco Bonami The Pantagruel Syndrome. T1 TorinoTriennaleTremusei, a project which opened in November 2005 and which explored excess, conceptual gigantism and the fragility of our pantagruelian world, through two solo exhibitions (Takashi Murakami and Doris Salcedo) and a city-wide group exhibition of works by 75 younger artists from around the world, including Tamy Ben-Tor, Fernando Bryce, Sebastián Díaz Morales, Jin Kurashige, Araya Radsjamroensook and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Christov-Bakargiev graduated Magna cum Laude from the University of Pisa, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, in 1981, majoring in literature and art history. Her master thesis was on the relation between contemporary poetry and painting. She is married and has two children, Lucia and Rosa.

Photo: Ben Symons