Markus Waitschacher / curator talk

On Wednesday, November 30, 2022, at 6 p.m., the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka is presenting a curator talk with Markus Waitschacher, who has been staying in Rijeka as a guest of the Kamov Residency program, with the support of the STYRIA-ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE network and in collaboration with the Cultural Department of the Provincial Government of Styria.

 

 

Markus Waitschacher is an art mediator, curator and cultural anthropologist, and guest of the Kamov artist-in-residence program. In the final part of his stay in Rijeka, he will present curatorial, educational and artistic projects related to collecting practices, art collections and urban space research, in the format of a curator talk.

To whom a collection belongs, how to bring it closer to the community, what are the alternative forms of presenting art collections – these are some of the issues addressed by projects related to the collection of the City of Graz, such as the Abriss project by artist Alfredo Barsiglio, curated by Markus Waitschacher and Birgit Kulturer. Artworks selected from the colorful art collection of Stadt Graz were moved to private spaces in collaboration with the locals, and the artist and curators established a dialogue between the collection, the audience and the private and public space. The public space of the city, i.e. periphery of Graz, has been the topic of an interdisciplinary research that resulted in a book titled GrazRand, which combines the elements of travelogue, city guide, art book and urban research, and Waitschacher will present it, as one of the authors and editors, during the talk.

Waitschacher will speak about the mediation practices in his museum work, using the example of meetings with visitors at the Neue Gallerie Graz – Filtercafé, and online interviews with artists represented in the collection. He will also present educational cards designed by his associates from the Department of Education, Universalmuseum Joanneum. At the moment, a new, adapted edition of the cards is being printed in Rijeka, which Waitschacher created during the residency program, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Markus Waitschacher is an art mediator, curator and cultural anthropologist. His cultural anthropological research interests are the ethnographic turn in the visual arts, as well as questions of representational critique, both in ethnography and in the arts. His cultural anthropological practice focuses on urban research.

He works as an art educator at the Universalmuseum Joanneum, where he is responsible for modern and contemporary art at the Kunsthaus Graz and the Neue Galerie Graz. 

As a freelance curator, he works in various contexts, mostly site-specific and site-sensitive. Central moments of his curatorial practice are local phenomena, curiosities and legends, human and non-human relationships and the entanglements and connections of all this to larger histories.

Markus Waitschacher has curated projects and exhibitions at Kunstverein Kärnten (Klagenfurt, Austria), Kunstverein < rotor > (Graz, Austria), Pavelhaus (Laafeld, Austria), bazament gallery (Tirana, Albania), viennacontemporary (Vienna, Austria), Centro de Desarollo de las Artes Visuales (Havana, Cuba) and Kunstraum haaaauch-quer (Klagenfurt, Austria).

Since 2021 he is curator for visual arts at FORUM STADTPARK, an interdisciplinary art centre in Graz, Austria.

foto: Abriss: Alfredo Barusglia und die Sammlung der Stadt Graz, Kulturvermittlung Graz