Crepúsculos: Talk about the project, imaginaries and references of “Vampires in Space”

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Talk between Luís Silva and João Mourão, curators of Vampires in Space, Filipa Ramos, curator of Public Programme for Vampires in Space, and Benjamin Weil, director of the Centro de Arte Moderna of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

The cafeteria of the Gulbenkian Museum will stay open until 9pm, throughout the events of the public programme ‘Crepúsculos’.


BIOS

João Mourão and Luís Silva have worked as a curatorial duo since 2009. João Mourão is the director of Arquipélago – Contemporary Arts Centre in São Miguel, Azores, and Luís Silva is the director of Kunsthalle Lissabon, a project they both founded in 2009. They are the curators of Pedro Neves Marques' Vampires in Space, the Official Portuguese Representation at the 59th Edition of the Venice Biennale.

The research of Filipa Ramos, PhD, focuses on the relationship between culture and ecology, examining how contemporary art fosters relationships between nature and technology. Ramos has worked at the intersection between film and art as a curator of Art Basel Film and is the founder of the artists' cinema Vdrome. For London's Serpentine Gallery, she co-created the arts, humanities and science festival The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish and is curator of "Persons Persone Personen", the 8th Gherdëina Biennale (2022).

Director of the Centro de Arte Moderna since 2021.

Born and raised in Paris, Benjamin Weil studied art history before moving to New York in 1985, where he worked as Assistant Curator for a major private art collection until 1989. He also attended the Curatorial Training Program of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (1987), and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program (graduating in 1989). He then worked as an independent curator and art critic, publishing regularly in specialized magazines – he also was a New York correspondent for Flash Art International (1992-95). In 1995, he co-founded Ada Web, the first digital studio dedicated to the production of art projects online and was its Artistic Director until 1997. In 1998, he was appointed as Director of the New Media Department at ICA London, before moving in 2000 to San Francisco, to assume the position of Curator of Media Arts at SFMOMA where he was responsible for the collection of Media Arts as well as of an exhibitions and a film program. He also launched a sound art program and commissioned art projects for the museum’s web site.

Weil returned to New York in 2006 to become the Executive Director of Artists Space; he moved back to Europe in 2009 to teach at the IUAV University of Venice, where he directed a research laboratory for doctoral students of visual arts. That year, he was appointed as Artistic Director at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, a new institution dedicated to the production and presentation of new forms resulting from the creative use of technology (2009-13). In 2014, he became the Artistic Director of Centro Botín (Santander, 2014-20), where he also curated numerous monographic exhibitions, and themed group exhibitions featuring works from the collection of Fundación Botín he was also responsible for during his tenure at Centro Botín.

Aside from regularly lecturing on contemporary art and participating in numerous juries – including the one of the Prince of Asturias Awards (2012 and 2013) – Benjamin Weil has conceptualized and directed H BOX, a video art commissioning and peripatetic exhibition project for Fondation d’entreprise Hermès (2005-11); he also curated Untitled (Orchestral), a site-specific installation by João Onofre at MAAT (Lisbon, 2017), among others.

He joined Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in early 2021 to assume the position of Director of CAM (Centro de Arte Moderna).


Crespúsculos

Public programme for “Vampires in Space”, Pedro Neves Marques’ project for the Portugal Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Learn more about CAM’s free activities for June 5th.

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