Markus Waitschacher – Curator in Residence
1.4.–17.4.2022.
Curator, art educator and cultural anthropologist, Markus Waitschacher, will stay in Kamov residency apartment in Rijeka during April and July 2022.
Markus Waitschacher is going to use his two-month stay as a curator-in-residence in Rijeka to create a ‘critical guide through the museum’. Putting an emphasis on the relationships between official and alternative narratives about the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, he examines how potential histories of the museum intertwine and communicate with its collections. With the foundation in his own transdisciplinary practice which resides on the intersection of art mediation, curating practices and anthropological approach, Waitschacher intends to carry out detailed research on the history of the MMSU’S collection, architecture and institutional structure. Along with interviews and discussions with the museum’s staff, artists from the collection and the museum’s visitors, Waitschacher will conduct ethnographic research in and outside the institution. The research results will be presented in analogue and digital forms.
About curator:
Markus Waitschacher is an art mediator, curator and cultural anthropologist. He lives and works in Graz, Austria. 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.
Collectively with Adina Camhy, Coline Robin and Robin Klengel, he has brought out publications on various neighbourhoods and places in artistic-scientific 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. On the side, he revises the publication of the art collection of the city of Graz together with Birgit Kulterer. They invite different artists to think about new and alternative forms of presentation of a collection.
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.
Residency is suported by the Cultural Department of the Styrian Regional Government /Kultur – Land Steiermark.
Photo: Alfred Lenz; Markus Waitschacher in: Alfred Lenz: untitled, viennacontemporary, 2020
