- Residency period: Spring 2025
- Tools for Play Workshop
Yana Foqué 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 and historical structures that shape them. Her writing has been published by Frieze and Metropolis M, among others. Until relocating permanently to the Baltics, she held the position of Executive Director & Chief Curator at Kunstverein, Amsterdam, where she shaped its experimental program while overseeing its publishing arm and international partnerships.
Foqué 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 a part 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—artists who share a commitment to finding a frame for their work outside of conventional formats, and who, in doing so, redefine what it means to be an artist.
Though Foqué’s practice has become synonymous with Kunstverein’s programme – a reality of working in a small institution where everyone does everything and time constantly evaporates – the specific way in which she has continued its experimental legacy reflects her practice as an independent curator.
Recent projects include the first major European retrospective of queer punk icon G.B. Jones, the first-ever monograph on the institutional-critical practice of Christopher D’Arcangelo (edited with Isabelle Sully and co-published with Artists Space), co-editing Suzon, a 20-year collection of writings by Raimundas Malašauskas. Her final project at Kunstverein, Curtain Call, was a 24-hour exhibition featuring works by Ceel Mogami de Haas, Sissel Tolaas, Barbara Visser, Ola Vasiljeva and Zahar Bondar, offering a reflection on the death of an institution.
yana.report