A curator and writer based in Paris, Kathryn Weir is currently the artistic director of the Madre Museum of Contemporary Art Donnaregina in Naples. Her practice engages with critical thinking on technology, race, class, gender, and political ecology in the context of exhibition making.
Previously director of multidisciplinary programs at the Centre Pompidou, she created ‘Cosmopolis’ there in 2015 as a platform for research-based, socially engaged and collaborative art practices. Conceived to construct bridges between new forms of creative experimentation and critical vocabularies across reconfigured histories and geographies, the platform encompasses activities ranging from residencies to exhibitions and programs. She also created the annual festival ‘MOVE: performance, dance, moving image’ at the Centre Pompidou in 2017.
From 2006 until 2014, she was director of the Australian Cinémathèque and chief curator of international art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane and was one of the curators of the 5th, 6th and 7th Asia Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art. Weir’s other curatorial projects include ‘Collective Body’ (at Dhaka Art Summit 2020), ‘Sublime, Passages to the Infinite’ (2014-2015), ‘21st Century: Art in the first decade’ (2010-2011), ‘Small Acts’ (2009), ‘The Leisure Class’ (2007-2008), ‘Hong Kong, Shanghai: Cinema Cities’ (2007), ‘Kiss of the Beast’ (2005-2006) and ‘The Nature Machine: Contemporary Art, Nature and Technology’ (2004-2005).
Her publications include Modern Ruin (QAGOMA, 2008), The View From Elsewhere (Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 2009), Sculpture is Everything (QAGOMA, 2012), and Gorilla (with Ted Gott, Reaktion Books, 2013).