Kerstin Winking is an Amsterdam-based curator and scholar of cultural studies. She has curated and organized exhibitions and programs at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Kunstfort in Vijfhuizen, and the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum. Kerstin has curated solo exhibitions with Ahmet Öğüt, Tala Madani, Vincent Vulsma, Quinsy Gario and Tromarama, and group exhibitions with contemporary artists exploring theories of hybridity, strategies of ethnographic museology, primitivism, and contemporary art’s relationship with colonial histories. In 2017, she curated “The Djaya Brothers: Revolusi in the Stedelijk” with archival material and works by the Indonesian modernists Agus Djaya and Otto Djaya for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She is a co-producer of the feature length film Stones Have Laws (2018) by Lonnie van Brummelen, Siebren de Haan and Tolin Alexander. “Mindful Circulations” (2019) is her last exhibition in Mumbai, a site-specific curatorial experiment in conveying poetic knowledge about colonial histories through contemporary art.
During her residency, Kerstin will continue her explorations of Indonesian modern art, and specifically the relationships between the teaching and thought of Rabindranath Tagore and Indonesian modernists like Rusli, Emira Sunassa, and Agus Djaya. She is especially interested in the notion of “primitivist environmentalism” used by Partha Mitter to describe the educational ideology that was promoted at Kala Bhavan, the art school at Tagore’s Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, India.
More information about her work can be found on her website.
This residency was made possible through the support of Mondriaan Fonds.