Steven Cairns is Curator of Artists’ Film and Moving Image at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2011—ongoing). He curated the ICA Artists’ Film Biennial 2016 and 2014 (London); and the Tramway artists’ moving image Festival 2014 (Glasgow). In 2013, he was Executive Producer on a series of artists’ moving image works for Channel 4’s Random Acts. He was also a jury member of the Jarman Award 2014.
In 2015, he was the selector of Film Open (Spike Island, Bristol; S1, Sheffield, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Castlefield Gallery, Manchester). Recent projects also took place at Kunstverein Munich, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the exhibition Squeezing Sorrow from an Ashtray, Bergen Kunsthall (all with James Richards 2015) and the sci-fi project Enter/Exit and NO WAY OUT at Kunsthalle Bern, 2015. In 2016, he was co-curator of the Liverpool Biennial, and convened the conference Archaeology & Exorcisms, which took place in Gothenburg, Sweden. In 2017 he published a volume of collected interviews titled Archaeology & Exorcisms: Moving Image and the Archive and co-curated the solo exhibition Hildegarde Duane: Western Woman at Kuenstlerhaus Stuttgart.