Natasha Ginwala has curated several international exhibitions and is a widely published arts writer. Ginwala is currently Associate Curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin, and, with Defne Ayas, is serving as co-curator of the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021). Recent projects include Contour Biennale 8 and she was part of the curatorial team of documenta 14 (2017). She is artistic director of the interdisciplinary arts festival Colomboscope in Sri Lanka. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014), curatorial advisor and public programmes curator of The Gujral Foundation project My East is Your West at the 56th Venice Biennale; and curated The Museum of Rhythm at Taipei Biennial 2012 and at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2016).
For the 13th Gwangju Biennale, the two Artistic Directors envision a dynamic program that includes an exhibition, performance program, publishing platform, and a series of public forums that bring together artists, scientists, and system thinkers. They will collectively explore artistic approaches and scientific methods that examine the entire spectrum of intelligence—that emanating from spirit beings, indigenous knowledge worlds, shamanistic cosmologies, and non-human cognition as well as from the machine brain and algorithmic regimes governing the world and their resulting interplay. The secret potential of spectral forces and shadow presences will be tapped into as part of the biennale-making process and its mechanisms, especially those threshold spaces between and beyond mystification and quantification.
