The artists residencies Art Explora – Cité internationale des arts

Magali Arriola is Director of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. She was KADIST Lead Curator for Latin America from 2016 to 2019, and curated the Mexican Pavilion for the 58 Venice Biennial (Pablo Vargas Lugo, Acts of God, 2019). She was Chief Curator at Museo Jumex between 2011 and 2014, and Chief Curator of Museo Tamayo between 2009 and 2011. Arriola has extensively written for books, and catalogues and has contributed to publications such as Art Forum, Curare, Frieze, Mousse, Manifesta Journal, and The Exhibitionist, among others.

Photo credit: Pedro Luján. Courtesy Revista Capitel.

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Diana Campbell Betancourt is an American curator who has been working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. She is committed to fostering a transnational art world, and her plural and long-range vision addresses the concerns of underrepresented regions and artists alongside the more established in manifold forums. 

Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the critically acclaimed 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 editions. She has developed the Dhaka Art Summit into a leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers from across South Asia through a largely commission based model. Concurrent to her work in Bangladesh from 2016-2018, Campbell Betancourt was also the Founding Artistic Director of Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines, a non-profit international residency and exhibition programme with sites in Manila and Bataan.

Emanuele Coccia is associate  professor at the EHESS in Paris. He is the author of Sensible Life (2010), The Life of Plants (2018), Metamorphosis (2021) and Philosophy of the Home (2023). He has directed animation videos such as Quercus (2019, with Formafantasma), Heaven in Matter (2021, with Faye Formisano) and Portal of Mysteries (2022, with Dotdotdot). He is participating as advisor to several exhibitions. He is writing a four-handed work on the relationship between fashion and philosophy with Gucci's creative director Alessandro Michele. 

Photo credit: Frank Perrin.

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Artistic director, curator and producer, Isabelle Gaudrefroy is the current deputy general artistic director of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. She started her career at the Theatre des Amandiers in 1995. She then directed the Soirées Nomades at the Foundation Cartier from 1999 to 2010. In 2011, she joined the direction team of the foundation and has since curated landmark exhibitions such as Junya Ishigami, Freeing Architecture in 2018 and Trees in 2019.

Photo credit: Valentin Le Cron

Simon Njami is a Paris-based independent curator, lecturer, art critic and novelist. Njami was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Revue Noire, a journal of contemporary African and extra-occidental art. He has served as artistic director of the first Johannesburg art fair in 2008, the Bamako photography biennale for ten years and the Dak’art Biennale (2016-2018). He co-curated the first African pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. He also curated Afriques Capitales (Paris, Lille 2017), African Metropolis (Maxxi 2018), The Studio (Kampala Biennale 2019), This space between us (Las Palmas 2020), Materia Prima (San Giminiano 2021), amongst others.

Njami has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art and photography, including Africa Remix (2004-2007) and the first African Art Fair, held in Johannesburg in 2008. In 1998, he created the Pan African master classes in photography, with the Goethe Institut and directed it over 12 years, and set up the collection of contemporary art for the Memorial Acte museum in Guadeloupe. He published and edited numerous books among which the latest Stories Histories, the story of Revue noire (2020).

Photo credit: Cyrille Choupas.

Hans Ulrich Obrist b. 1968, Zürich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show ‘World Soup (The Kitchen Show)’ in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is a contributing editor to Artforum, AnOther Magazine, Cahiers D'Art, and 032C; he is a regular contributor to Mousse and Kaleidoscope and he writes columns for Das Magazin and Weltkunst. In 2011 he received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts. His recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) and The Athens Dialogues (2018).

Photo credit: Tyler Mitchell