Page 5 — Cruising Curators

Cruising Curators

About Us

Cruising is a practice that can take shape in different forms. It could be sailing about without a precise destination or wandering and waiting if someone makes eye contact. It could be driven by sexual stimulation or merely by curiosity and the need for dialogue.
The coincidental, ephemeral and yet meaningful encounters serve as an extension of knowledge-production, reflection and learning together: Cruising Curators is an open invitation to think, act, recollect, fuse and circulate together with our communities-to-be.

A space for intertwining intercommunal curatorial practices is initiated by a group of cultural workers who are in search of a continuous tale of interactions, bringing spontaneous hunches, instants and stories from theory, fiction and daily spheres into artistic practices, which aren’t necessarily bound to a physical manifestation of an end product. Adopting cruising and crossing paths within our urban jumble as a research method, the goal is to initiate different forms of contact through the curatorial. In response to the world’s fast-paced and consuming setting, slow methodologies are used, allowing long-term exercises and in-depth discussions to unfold organically.
The collective started off as a working group of the 11th Berlin Biennale’s Curatorial Workshop How now to gather and is currently constituted by: Bengisu Çağlayan, Raphael Daibert, Luise Leon Elbern, Eirini Fountedaki, Viviane Tabach and Sarnt Utamachote.

Contact

cruisingcurators@gmail.com

Founding Members

Bengisu Çağlayan (she/her) is a curator and cultural worker practising within the realms of curatorial research, artistic collaboration methodologies, (non-)institutional partnerships and fundraising for the arts. Mainly interested in debates on ‘the moving body’ and the experience of choreographic phenomena, Çağlayan combines research and practice that address the isolated and collective psyche of subjugated bodies. She received a research scholarship from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe in 2023. Her five-part radio show that brings together soundscapes of politics, uprisings and identities aired on Refuge Worldwide, a community radio based in Berlin.
Keeping a second base in her native Istanbul, Çağlayan worked for the Istanbul Biennial since 2016 while undertaking additional roles for the Pavilion of Turkey at the International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. She writes regularly for the bimonthly magazine Sanat Dünyamız. Çağlayan holds a BA in Arts and Cultural Management from Istanbul Bilgi University and completed an Erasmus exchange program at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. bengisucaglayan.com

Raphael Daibert (he/him) is a Brazilian curator, artist, and researcher based in Berlin. He holds a Master's in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute (2018-2020). He is a founding member of Lanchonete.org (2013-2018), an artist-run cultural platform in the centre of São Paulo. He is part of the project Third Space, an artistic-pedagogical project founded as part of "Gruppendynamik - Der Blaue Reiter und Kollektive der Moderne" at the Lenbachhaus. His practice mainly focuses on collective anti-hegemonic art projects that attempt to combat the existing forces of oppression. Daibert is currently a PhD student and research assistant at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Luise Leon Elbern (she/her) is an architect and urban designer, who studied at Universidade de São Paulo and at Technical University Munich. In addition to her work as an architect and planner, she has been working as research assistant at TUM and was exhibition mediator at the German Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia in 2018. In 2021, Luise was an INITIAL scholarship holder at the Akademie der Künste. She is currently studying Art in Context at UdK and is also a co-founder of the multidisciplinary collective CollColl e.V., which pursues interventions and participatory sites in public space. They have been part of IBA Thüringen, IBA Stuttgart and have been invited to the Eco Solidarity Fair by the Goethe-Institut NYC.

Eirini Fountedaki (she/her) is a curator and writer based in Berlin and Athens. She co-curated the film- screening series Residing in the Borderlands at SAVVY Contemporary—The Laboratory of Form- Ideas (2019-2020), which intended to create a new cartography of Berlin through diasporic perspectives. She is the co-editor of the publication How does the world breathe now? and has co-curated for exhibitions and festivals such as 15th Forum Expanded, Berlinale and London Short Film Festival (2020). She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory (Goldsmiths, University of London) and is currently a curatorial fellow of ARTWORKS (Athens). As SAHA Studio's Curatorial Fellow (2022), she researched the intersection of activism and feminism in Istanbul, where she pursued her research on feminist artistic practices in the Mediterranean region.

Viviane Tabach (she/her) is a Brazilian curator and art mediator based in Berlin. Her work centers on educational methods within curatorial and artistic practices. Viviane’s research delves into what makes art institutions effective learning spaces and how the public can be better integrated into this context. She has co-founded and co-directed the art space Casa Aberta in São Paulo, where she organized transdisciplinary projects that integrated music, dance, visual arts, and other forms of expression. She was an art mediator (sobat) for documenta fifteen (2022). She is an MA student in Art in Context at UdK and has a postgraduate degree in Art: Criticism and Curatorship from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo and a Teaching Practice and BA of Visual Arts from the Instituto de Artes da Universidade Estadual Paulista.

Sarnt Utamachote(they/them) is a filmmaker and curator. They are a co-founder of collective un.thai.tled, through which they curated un.thai.tled Film Festival Berlin (2019-) as well as Beyond the kitchen: Stories from the Thai Park (2020). Their video installation I Am Not Your Mother was officially exhibited at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and nominated for R.D. Pestonji Award for Best Thai Short Film at Thai Short Film and Video Festival Bangkok 2020. They are the 2020 recipient of Queer Short FIlm Fund from Xposed Queer Film Festival Berlin. sarntutamachote.com

CC: Foreword to Leonilson
(Workshop)

on the occasion of the exhibition Leonilson Drawn 1975–1993 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art

20 May 2021, 7 pm
In English

Image (left) Leonilson, Sem título (untitled), 1990. Courtesy: Bank Itaú Collection, São Paulo

Cruising Curators proposes a collective exercise in the form of a reflective reading session on the occasion of the exhibition Leonilson Drawn 1975–1993 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
This online event focuses on enhancing mutual contact, departing from the current duality of affection-infection and tackling the realities of the back then and the right now. Our first contact is established both via exchange of postcards – using written language as an introductory medium – as well as through collective slow reading. Including a selection of works by Leonilson and excerpts from Samuel R. Delany’s book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), this exercise aims to create intimate spaces for shared reflections between the participants. As an open invitation to join Cruising Curators’ collective methodologies, this session aspires to be an investigation on the politics and spaces of proximity (interferences with the body, the urban landscape, the pandemic etc) and an expansion of the contact to “possible others”.

Further details are available here.