INSTITUTING


Following a period of opposition in the late twentieth century marked by the rise of the independent curator challenging institutional authority, curatorial practice has more recently re-entered the institutional sphere, occupying complex roles that blur the boundaries between independence and affiliation...

This shift aligns with theories of alter-institutionality and New Institutionalism, wherein curators simultaneously contest, appropriate, and collaborate with institutions to reconnect them to their social and cultural agency. Rather than rejecting or fully assimilating, contemporary curators enact strategies that both destabilise and renew institutional logics, creating dynamic spaces of negotiation and innovation beyond traditional museological paradigms. Instituting is best understood as the study of institutions as forms under continual negotiation rather than as stable containers.

Professors

Charles Esche

Curator, writer, and museum director

Charles Esche

Charles Esche is a curator, writer, museum director, and educator whose work has significantly shaped contemporary art discourse and institutional practice. Director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven from 2004 to 2024 and Professor of Contemporary Art and Curating at the University of the Arts London, he is known for experimental exhibition models and socially engaged approaches to collections, biennials, and public programs.

Elena Sorokina

Elena Sorokina

Elena Sorokina has held key positions within major art events, notably as Associate Curator of documenta 14 (Athens/Kassel) and as Director of HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Belgium in 2017. In 2020, she co-founded the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care. In 2022, she co-curated the Armenian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Her curatorial practice unfolds on an international scale, within museums and art platforms such as BOZAR (Brussels), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Pera Museum (Istanbul), the Rudolfinum (Prague), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris). She is currently co-curating Survival Kit Festival in Riga, Latvia, entitled Arrow of the Wind: On Artists and Healers.

Viktor Misiano

Curator, editor, and theorist

Viktor Misiano

Viktor Misiano is a curator, editor and theorist. He has curated multiple artistic institutions and major artistic events, including the Pushkin National Museum of Fine Arts and the Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He is also the founder of the Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary Curatorship (Amsterdam). His main research focuses on post-Soviet and East-European contemporary art, and the social and geopolitical role of curatorial practice.

András Szántó

András Szántó

András Szántó, PhD, advises museums, cultural institutions, and leading brands on cultural strategy. An author and editor, his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, and many other publications. As a cultural strategy advisor, he consults museums, foundations, cultural and educational institutions on strategic planning and new project development worldwide. He has overseen the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museums of Tomorrow Roundtable at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Szántó, who lives in Brooklyn, has been conducting conversations with art-world leaders since the early 1990s, including as a frequent moderator of the Art Basel Conversations series. His recent books include The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues (2020), Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects (2022), and The Future of the Art World: 38 Dialogues (2025).

Molemo Moiloa

Molemo Moiloa

Molemo Moiloa lives and works in Johannesburg, and has worked in various capacities at the intersection of creative practice and community organizing. She currently works on notions of ungovernability, social infrastructures of cultural organizing, and relationships to nature. Molemo is co-director of creative sector insights and data analytics company, Andani.Africa. She is one half of the artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK, who explore everyday popular imaginaries and their modalities for knowledge production. She also co-leads the Open Restitution Africa project, an Africa-focused research platform for restitution of African heritage and co-leads the ungovernable, an experiment in communitary practice and ungovernability. Molemo was a Soros Arts Fellow 2023/24, was a Chevening Clore Fellow 2016/17, and winner of a Vita Basadi Award for 2017. MADEYOULOOK were selected artists of the South African Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2024, were DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellows for visual arts 2022 and Lumbung artists at documenta fifteen, 2022. They were nominees for the VLC Prize for Art and Politics 2016/17 at the New School, New York and the MTN Young Contemporaries 2012.

Fabio Cavallucci

Curator, art critic, lecturer

Fabio Cavallucci

Fabio Cavallucci is the founder of Institution and a curator. He has directed several cultural institutions in Italy and abroad. He teaches Contemporary Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara.

Vesna Madžoski

Vesna Madžoski

Vesna Madžoski (PhD) is a fellow at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She taught critical theory in the MA Artistic Research Program at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and has initiated multiple international art projects. Since 2006, she has been a member of the Amsterdam-based art collective Public Space With A Roof. As a lecturer, she has delivered numerous talks and lectures on contemporary art at leading art and theory institutes in Europe and the USA. She was one of the editors of the Belgrade-based magazine Prelom. Over the past decade, her research has focused on analyzing the global art system, with a particular interest in identifying forms of control and censorship within this domain. Her PhD dissertation, titled DE CVRATORIBVS. The Dialectics of Care and Confinement (Atropos Press, 2013), examines curatorship in post-World War II Europe and the consequences of transformations in this field at both aesthetic and political levels. With a group of enthusiasts, she initiated SKVER in 2018 with the aim of preserving the recent history of Timok Region Valley in Serbia. More info: https://madzoski.synthasite.com/

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Institution S.R.L. - Piazza Garibaldi, 12 - 47018 - Santa Sofia - Italy

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