Chus Martínez + Gemma Carbó
Towards a new artistic training.
The current institutions for artistic training and mediation are undergoing profound transformations to adapt their programmes and missions to the increasingly accelerated transformations of the cultural sphere. Chus Martínez’s international experience in the different fields of management and mediation in the sector talks with Gemma Carbó about the crisis of tradition and the alternative visions of different international centres.
Chus Martínez, Director of the Institute of Art of the Academy of Art and Design in Basel.
Gemma Carbó, President of the Interarts Foundation. Director of the Foundation’s Rural Life Museum and President of international ConArte Association.
Chus Martínez
A Spanish art curator, historian and writer, she has been the director of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel (Switzerland) since 2014. She studied philosophy and art history at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and continued her training in Germany and the United States. She started as an independent curator and programming director of the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao (2002-2005). In September 2005, she was elected director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, being the first woman to hold this position in the renowned art centre’s 150-year history. In 2008, she moved to Barcelona where she was the chief curator of MACBA until 2011. In December 2010, she announced that she was leaving MACBA to join the Documenta team, led by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. In 2012, she was named chief curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York.
She participated in the 2005 Venice Biennale and has been a curatorial advisor for Carnegie International and the 29th São Paulo Biennial. Simultaneously, she curated numerous exhibitions during her time at MACBA, and also curated exhibitions in other institutions, such as the Reina Sofía Art Museum in Madrid.
Chus Martínez gives lectures, regularly writes critical essays in catalogues and is a regular contributor to Artforum, among other international art magazines. In 2010, Flash Art magazine included her in its list of the 101 most influential curators in the world.
Gemma Carbó
She is a cultural manager and PhD in educational sciences who currently directs the Carulla Foundation’s Rural Life Museum. She is president of the Interarts Foundation and the International ConArte Association as well as a professor at the University of Girona and the Open University of Catalonia. She was previously the director of the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policies and Cooperation as well as a consultant for international organisations in the areas of the relationship between cultural and educational policies.
