Ruhr Region
My website: www.inkearns.de I am the (artistic) director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein (www.hmkv.de) in Dortmund, Germany, since 2005. I have worked internationally as a curator, writer and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. I lived in Paris (1982–86), graduated from high-school in West-Berlin in 1988, studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988–96) and in 2004 obtained a PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin, with a thesis focusing on a paradigmatic shift in the way artists reflected the historical avant-garde and the notion of utopia in visual and media art projects of the 1980s and 1990s in (ex-)Yugoslavia and Russia. Under my direction, HMKV was nominated six times for the Prize for Kunstvereine of ADKV and ART COLOGNE (2007, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2017), and received the ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize for Kunstvereine in 2017, after receiving an Honorary Mention in 2013; in 2010 the US-based art magazine ARTFORUM counted “Arctic Perspective” among the “Best Exhibitions 2010″; in 2011 HMKV received the JUMP Annual Sponsorship Award for Art Organisations funded by Kunststiftung NRW; and in early 2013 HMKV’s exhibition “Sounds Like Silence” was awarded the “Exceptional Exhibition of the year 2012" award by the German section of AICA (Association internationale des critiques d'art). Together with Sylvia Sasse and Igor Chubarov I received the Justus Bier Prize for Curators for the exhibition "The Storming of the Winter Palace - Forensics of an Image" (2017-18). In 2021, "Artists & Agents - Performance Art and Secret Services", curated with Sylvia Sasse and Kata Krasznahorkai received the "Exhibition of the Year 2020" award by the German section of AICA. I have been teaching at universities and art academies in Berlin, Leipzig, Zurich, Dortmund, Rotterdam, Witten/Herdecke, and Amsterdam (2000-2017), and in 2021-22 I worked as a visiting professor for curatorial practice at the Munster Art Academy. I have lectured and published internationally. Books include Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) – eine Analyse ihrer künstlerischen Strategien im Kontext der 1980er Jahre in Jugoslawien (2002), Netzkulturen (2002), Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel (2004).
From 1993 I have been curating exhibitions in various institutions as an independent curator.
Since 1996 I organised and curated various conferences on the topics of Kinetographien (2001), Software Art (2005), Peripheries (2006), Creative Work and Copyright (2008), the Arctic (2010), Money and Debt in the Post-Industrial World (2014), Afro-Tech (2017).
Books include Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) – eine Analyse ihrer künstlerischen Strategien im Kontext der 1980er Jahre in Jugoslawien (Museum Ostdeutsche Galerie, 2002), Netzkulturen (Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2002), Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2004). I also published numerous articles in books and journals and edited many exhibition catalogues. You can find the complete list at www.inkearns.de
http://www.hmkv.de