A curator and writer based in Paris and Naples, Kathryn Weir was named artistic director of the Madre museum of contemporary art in 2019. Current and recent curatorial projects include Lagos Biennial 2021/2023, ‘Claire Tabouret: I am spacious, singing flesh’ (Collateral Event, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia), ‘Rethinking Nature’ (2021–2022), ‘Utopia Dystopia: the myth of progress seen from the South’ (2021- 2022) and ‘Collective Body’ (Dhaka Art Summit 2020).
She was previously director of multidisciplinary programs at the Centre Pompidou, and created ‘Cosmopolis’ there in 2015 as a platform for research-based, socially engaged and collaborative practices that reconfigure art’s histories and geographies. She also established the annual festival ‘MOVE: performance, dance, moving image’ in 2017. From 2006-14, at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, she was chief curator of contemporary international art, directed the Australian Cinémathèque, and was a member of the curatorium of the 5th, 6th and 7th Asia Pacific Triennials, as well as leading the major project ‘21st Century: art in the first decade’ (2010-2011). Her curatorial and writing practice engages with critical thinking on gender, technology, race, class and political ecology.
Published books include Cosmopolis #1.5: Enlarged Intelligence (Centre Pompidou/ Mao Jihong Arts Fondation, 2018), Gorilla (Reaktion Books, 2013), Sculpture is Everything (QAGOMA, 2012), The View From Elsewhere (Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 2009) and Modern Ruin (QAGOMA, 2008).