Curators

The Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie in 2017 will be curated by a team of experts around Florian Ebner (Museum Folkwang, Essen) and Christin Müller (freelance curator, Leipzig). In the picture (from left): Fabian Knierim, Kerstin Meincke, Boaz Levin, Christin Müller, Kathrin Schönegg, Florian Ebner © Lys Yolanda Seng

Florian Ebner
(*1970, Regensburg) became chief of photography at Centre Pompidou in July 2017. Previously, he was director of the photography collection at Museum Folkwang in Essen (since November 2012). Ebner was the first curator of photography selected to curate the German Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2015. From 2009 to 2012, he was director of the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, and in 2008/9 he was in charge of the Photographic Collection at the Berlinische Galerie. Prior to that, he taught photography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. He has produced numerous exhibitions and publications on modernist and contemporary photography. His exhibition on new forms of journalistic images, Cairo. Open City. New Testimonies of an Ongoing Revolution (with Constanze Wicke) was selected by the German section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) as exhibition of the year in 2013. Other widely acclaimed shows include (Mis)Understanding Photography—Werke und Manifeste, Museum Folkwang (2014), Rhetorik der Bilder at the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig (2011), as well as So weit kein Auge reicht. Berliner Panoramafotografien 1949–1952, Berlinische Galerie (2008/9).

Christin Müller
(*1983, Leipzig) is a freelance curator and author. She studied cultural studies and aesthetical practice at the Universität Hildesheim. From 2011 to 2013 she was a research fellow in the program Museumskuratoren für Fotografie. Followed by her curation of the exhibition Cross Over – Fotografie der Wissenschaft + Wissenschaft der Fotografie in the Fotomuseum in Winterthur. Since 2013 she has worked as the assistant to the collector Thomas Walther and from 2014 to 2015 she had a teaching appointment in the Art History department at the Universität Leipzig. Together with Florian Ebner she curated the exhibition series with/against the flow. Zeitgenössische fotografische Interventionen commissioned by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa).

Fabian Knierim
(*1976, Bochum) is an art historian with a focus on photography and has been working as a curator at the Fotomuseum WestLicht in Vienna since 2013. In 2012 he worked as an assistant curator for the Victoria & Albert museum in London and from 2009 to 2011 was a fellow at the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung in the program Museumskuratoren für Fotografie. From 2008 to 2014 he had various teaching appointments in the department of art history at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Boaz Levin
(*1989, Jerusalem) is an artist and freelance curator. He studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Since 2014 he has worked as a research assistant at the Universität der Künste where he directs, together with Hito Steyerl, Maximilian Schmoetzer, and Vera Tollmann, the Research Center for Proxy Politics. Since October 2016 he is part of the Graduiertenkolleg Kulturen der Kritik at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. Levin has participated in numerous international group exhibitions and film festivals, including The School of Kyiv (2015), FidMarseille (2015), Dinca Vision Quest (2015), and Former West (2013). Levin worked in collaboration with Marianna Liosi on the exhibition and research project Regarding Spectatorship: Revolt and The Distant Observer (2015/16).
  
Kerstin Meincke
(*1981, Göttingen) is freelance curator and scientific fellow for the DFG-project Anachronie und Präsenz: Ästhetische Wahrnehmungsformen und künstlerische Zeitlichkeitskonzepte im Black Atlantic at the Universität Duisburg-Essen. Her research and curatorial work deals with photography and media-related art in transnational contexts, for example her concept for the international workshop Spaces of Displacement. Negotiations of Migration and Refugeeism in Mass Media and Visual Arts in Lagos, Nigeria (in cooperation with Florian Ebner’s exhibition for the German pavilion at the Venice art Biennale 2015) and her curation of the exhibition of Voyage Retour (Museum Folkwang, Essen in Lagos, Nigeria, 2013, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut).

Kathrin Schönegg
(*1982) is a photo historian and holds a Thomas-Friedrich-scholarship for Research in Photography at the Berlinische Galerie. She was a research fellow at the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung in the program Museumskuratoren für Fotografie. Prior to this she was a doctoral fellow at the DFG Graduiertenkolleg Das Reale in der Kultur der Moderne at the Universität Konstanz. As freelance curator she has realized exhibition projects and published in the field of materiality and abstraction in photography, e.g. as co-publisher of the special issue Abstrakte Fotografie, Fotogeschichte (2014), and Jenseits der Repräsentation. Körperlichkeiten der Abstraktion in moderner und zeitgenössischer Kunst (2013).