Art as an Instrument of Awareness
8 November 2013, 6–7:30pm
Johnson Foundation Auditorium
John Lennon Art and Design Building
Liverpool John Moores University
Adelina von Fürstenberg will talk about her experience as founding director of the NGO ART for The World, an international curatorial platform that addresses pressing environmental, political and social issues through contemporary art. In our globalized present, art can be an effective instrument to overcome cultural boundaries, creating the basis for sustained cross-cultural dialogues. Over the last decades, this interest in cultural multiplicity has grown, becoming one of the most fertile areas for socio-cultural debate – a debate for which art is a privileged vector.
Adelina Cüberyan von Fürstenberg is a Swiss citizen of Armenian origin born in Istanbul. She is an internationally renowned curator and a pioneer in the field of curatorial pedagogy. While a Political Science student at the University of Geneva, von Fürstenberg founded the Centre for Contemporary Art, Geneva, in 1974, working with artists including Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren, General Idea, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol and Lawrence Weiner. From 1989 to 1994 she directed Le Magasin, Grenoble, where she curated solo exhibitions of such artists as Vito Acconci, Alighiero Boetti, Gino De Dominicis and Ilya Kabakov. Over the same period she directed the Ecole du Magasin (School of Curators), for which she was awarded a prize in 1993 by the International Jury of the 45th Venice Biennale. Among her most recent curatorial projects is FOOD, a large-scale travelling exhibition exploring questions of survival, health, economy and culture through contemporary art, and the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art.