The artistic director of the next Venice Biennale will be Christine Macel, the international exhibition’s board of directors announced today (23 January). The 57th biennale is due to open in 2017 on 13 May and run until 26 November.
Macel has been the chief curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, since 2000, overseeing the department of “création contemporaine et prospective”. She has organised solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou dedicated to Anri Sala (2012), Philippe Parreno (2009) and Sophie Calle (2003).
The biennial’s president, Paolo Baratta, says in a statement that Macel’s experience at the Beaubourg gallery “has long offered her a vantage point rich in potential from which to observe and identify new energies coming from various parts of the world”.
Macel was the curator of the French Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, presenting works by Anri Sala, and co-organised the Belgian Pavilion exhibition of works by Eric Duyckaerts in 2007. She co-curated the show, Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (until 6 March; due to open 10 June at the Centre Pompidou).
The 56th edition, which closed on 22 November last year, included 89 official national pavilions and drew more than 500,000 visitors. The central show, All the World’s Futures, the most politically oriented Biennale exhibition in years, was organised by Okwui Enwezor, the director of Haus der Kunst in Munich.
