Marco Scotini Announced as Curator for the Second Yinchuan Biennale

Marco Scotini was announced as the curator for the upcoming second edition of the Yinchuan Biennale, which will take place from June to September 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan—the first contemporary art museum in northwest China. The first edition made headlines when Ai Weiwei, the country’s most outspoken artist, was prohibited from exhibiting in the biennale due to his political activism. 

Upon the announcement, artistic director of MOCA Yinchuan Suchen Hsieh stated, “MOCA Yinchuan has been focusing both on the ecology issue and cultural crossroad between East and West, therefore it is a great honor for us to appoint Marco Scotini as the curator of the second Yinchuan Biennale, [due to] his extensive international experience in the curatorial field and his particular research on these specific topics.”

Scotini is currently the artistic director of FM Center for Contemporary Art in Milan. He has also been the head of the visual arts and curatorial studies department at Nuovo Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan since 2004, and the head of exhibition programs at Parco Arte Vivente, Turin, since 2014. From 2004 to 2016, he was the artistic director of the Gianni Colombo Archive. Alongside Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Scotini organized numerous retrospectives devoted to Gianni Colombo’s work at international institutions, such as Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Austria; Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich; and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin.

Scotini has curated more than two hundred solo exhibitions of artists from Eastern and Central Europe, Latin America, Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He has collaborated with various art institutions, including Documenta, Manifesta, SALT, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and other programs at the university, as well as Van Abbemuseum. He curated the Albanian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale as well as three editions of the Prague Biennale in 2003, 2005 and 2007, in addition to other biennial exhibitions across Europe and Asia.

Scotini’s ongoing video project and discussion platform, “Disobedience Archive,” traveled for ten years throughout Europe, the United States and Mexico. Scotini is the author and editor of various books, and founded the bookzine No Order: Art in a Post-Fordist Society. He has also written for a number of Italian and international magazines, such as Alfabeta, Kaleidoscope and Manifesta Journal.

Je Seung is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.

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