• Residency period: Summer 2024
  • Individual Residency

Yana Foque is a Belgian curator, editor and writer whose main interest lies in institutional critique expressed through notions of collaboration and authorship, and the social/political/historical structures that shape them. Her writing has been published by Frieze and Metropolis M, among others. Since 2019, she has held the position of Executive Director & Chief Curator of Kunstverein, Amsterdam, and its affiliated publishing house and franchise. 

Foque increasingly sees her practice as a director-curator as an artistic one: a meta form where the creative thinking that goes into keeping the lights on is as much of the show as what visitors see hanging on the walls. In this way, she leans into the methodologies of the artists she works with, who share a commitment to finding a frame for their work outside of the regular formats and, in doing so, redefine what it means to be an artist. Though Foque’s practice has become synonymous with Kunstverein’s programme – a reality of working in a small institution in which everyone does everything and where time constantly evaporates – the specific way in which she has continued the experimental legacy of the institution is a reflection of her practice as an independent curator. 

Recent projects include the first major European exhibition retrospective of the queer, no-budget, Canadian Punk Polygloth G.B. Jones, the first-ever monograph on the institutional critical practice of Christopher D’Arcangelo (edited together with Isabelle Sully, co-published with Artists Space), and ‘From East to West, Through the Globe, Towards the Moon’ an archival solo-show with work by Barbara Kozłowska. While in residence at NAC, Foque’s focus will be to read through the texts of Raimundas Malašauskas for his forthcoming book Suzon (published in collaboration with Grazer Kunstverein, KW Berlin and Kunstverein Publishing), as well as writing a text on the death of institutions. She will work only during her son’s naps (13:00–15:00).

yana.report