We are thrilled to have welcomed and to introduce to you the new group of five international participants of the Curatorial Programme to Amsterdam: Eugene Hannah Park (1992, South Korea), Billy Fowo (1996, Cameroon), Jean-Michel Mabruki Mussa (1999, Democratic Republic of Congo), Marina Christodoulidou (Cyprus, 1991), and Meghana Karnik (1989, United States).

We would like to take this opportunity to extend our gratitude to the advisory committee who helped de Appel in the selection process: Riksa Afiaty (Curator, Indonesia), Övül Durmusoglu (Former CP participant, Curator and writer, Berlin), Nicoline van Harskamp (Artist & Professor for Performative Art, Munster) Edwin Nasr (Fromer CP Participant & fellow, curator at CCA Berlin), Huib Haye van der Werf (Interim Director and Curator, Amsterdam), Liza Nijhuis (Curatorial Programme Coordinator, de Appel, Amsterdam).

The CP participants have already started meeting with members of cultural institutions and practitioners in the Netherlands. We’re looking forward to continuing our curatorial training trajectory in the next ten months where they will be exploring different issues including; how to look at curating as a form of structural change rather than only exhibition making, art economy and funding, curating during times of change and crisis, collective tools and approaches to artistic and curatorial practice, and certainly preparing for their final project which opens in October 2023.

If you have suggestions for the CPs of exhibitions or events to attend in the Netherlands which you are hosting please do write to us.

The Curatorial Programme at de Appel is kindly supported by Ammodo and Hartwig Art Foundation. De Appel is supported by Gemeente Amsterdam and Mondriaan Fonds.

Eugene Hannah Park (1992, South Korea) explores the possibility of learning by collective minds. Her practices intersect different histories and localities, creating schisms and holes in the homogenous hegemony. She curates and produces tools and platforms as an ingredient to share questions and translate worlds; and is interested in collaborating with diverse cultural practitioners to create the carrier of plural futurity. Throughout the year in de Appel, Eugene anticipates connecting different curatorial languages of peers hoping this will lead to constructing new constellations.

She recently curated Arecibo (2021) in Seoul, questioning the radical imaginations that reshape reality based on the research of speculative fiction and science fiction. Eugene is the recipient of the Doosan Curatorial Workshop (2021) and ARKO Creative Academy Art Council of Korea (2020), and worked in institutions as an exhibition coordinator at the Seoul Museum of Art and ARKO Art Center. She also continues to work as part of collectives such as Against The Dragon Light (ADL), a research project that seeks to find the socially-engaged practices in the Four Asian Dragons (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), Care for Collective Curatorial (CCC), an experimental learning platform that explores ideas of care, collectivity and curatorial thinking, and Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR).

Eugene’s participation in the Curatorial Programme is supported by Arts Council Korea.

Billy Fowo (1996, Cameroon) is a curator and writer based in Berlin and working at SAVVY Contemporary – The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Germany.

Very much grounded in the idea of the Laboratory, for Billy, rethinking and stretching the idea of the exhibition as a format, forms an essential part of his research and curatorial approach. With points of interest in various fields and disciplines such as the sonic, linguistics and literature, Billy Fowo questions through his practice what is considered knowledge and the spaces in which we find knowledge. Throughout the year at de Appel, he hopes to connect, exchange and learn from the other participants’ practices, and the possibilities Amsterdam offers as an intersectional point.

Recently, he co-curated projects such as Unraveling The (Under-) Development Complex, An Ode to Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, 50 Years On (1972 - 2022), SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2022), Wata Go Lef Stone, On the Perpetuity of Accara Across the Oceans, an offering within A Parábola Do Progresso, Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo (2022), ENIGMA #59: ROMAN – a retrospection on / by Paris-based artist Bili Bidjocka, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2021). Billy Fowo is one of the coordinators of SAVVY Records – one of the newly founded SAVVY Pillars.

Jean-Michel Mabruki Mussa (1999, Democratic Republic of Congo) is a curator and cultural practitioner based in Amsterdam. His curatorial and research practice focuses on space, repurposing institutional knowledge, different methodologies of exhibition making and conceptual art. Jean-Michel is interested in the ways in which theories on conceptual exhibition design relate to contemporary discourse regarding interpretations of space and displacement. In his practice he (re-)interprets findings in these discourses to figure out how to remodel institutional and hegemonic infrastructures and knowledge. Jean-Michel is excited by the possibilities of peer-learning and the merging of localities fundamental to de Appel’s institutional identity.

Jean-Michel has worked at and with different spaces and galleries in Amsterdam, including Patty Morgan (2020-2021), Laurel Project Space (2021) and Stigter van Doesburg (2022). His most recent curated exhibition has been “Architecture of Goodbye: an Ode to Posterity”, which was Laurel Project Space’s final exhibition in their last space in Amsterdam.

Marina Christodoulidou (Cyprus, 1991) is a researcher and curator based in Nicosia. Traversing curatorial formats, her practice emerges from critical, artist-led infrastructures and self-organized initiatives. Her projects often take the form of discursive exhibitions, writing, socially engaged practice and architecture. Marina's decolonial reading of Cyprus history and the complexities of its partition act as a departure point for her research and approach. Through de Appel CP, together with her peers, she is interested in exploring working methods that confabulate and perform collective curatorial practice.

Marina has previously worked for the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale (2015-19), and co-curated the Anachoresis project which represented Cyprus at the Architecture Biennale (2021). Anachoresis proposed the table as an object which projects a spatial protocol of sociality. Selected projects include hypersurfacing (2019) at NiMAC in Nicosia, an exhibition and a forum showcasing the synergies and plurality of contemporary art practices in Cyprus and internationally. The Broken Pitcher (2020-) is an ongoing collaborative project that re-enacts an eviction story, with the colonial history of debt as its backdrop, and seeks out potentials for interacting with it. TBP has been presented in public squares across Cyprus, at Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia; Beirut Art Center; GfZK, Leipzig.

Meghana Karnik (1989, United States) works across modalities as a curator, arts administrator, and writer; exploring paradoxes between art and social change, belief and technology, lived experience and institutional process. For Meghana, curating is shaped by relationships—to people, infrastructures, and resources. She has been researching, “How do we relate in a culture without fact, but only of wordplay?” through Process-As-Practice at The Luminary (St. Louis). At de Appel, she seeks to learn from colleagues building support structures and autonomy into the process of making art public.

Meghana’s recent curatorial projects include Tamar Ettun: How To Trap A Demon (2022), presenting the artist’s research into somatic empathy, talismanic objects, and astrology as storytelling; and TITLE TBD (2020), a group exhibition which viewed failure as a seed to reimagine artistic communities, emphasizing peer support and the solidarity economy.

From 2021-2022, Meghana was Manager, Grants & Artist Initiatives at Art Matters Foundation (New York) supporting Artist2Artist, a grant program that shifts philanthropic power to artists. From 2019-2020, she was Associate Curator for FRONT International 2022 (Cleveland). From 2015-2019, she was Program Manager and later, Associate Director of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space (New York), a curatorial incubator presenting exhibitions and SHIFT: A Residency for Arts Workers.

Meghana’s participation in the Curatorial Programme is made possible through an NAF Cultural Grant from The Netherland-America Foundation.