Coimbra Session

Walking into a gallery, a museum, an independent space, a biennial, an exhibition place is always an experience. We visit art exhibitions, but do we actually look at the artworks on display? What are our reasons for going out to encounter works of art? What pushes us to get out of our comfort zone and rediscover the world?

Daniel Baumann is a Swiss art historian (lic. ès lettres, Université de Genève), curator, and critic. He served as curator from 1996 to 2014 of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland. In 1997, he curated Martin Kippenberger. Respektive at Mamco in Geneva. He was the curator of Kunsttangente, a public art project in Basel, Switzerland (2003-2010), and curated, in 2003, Junge Szene at Secession in Vienna. In 2004, he started an exhibition series in Tbilisi, Georgia (until 2009/2016). In 2009, he curated Fantastic Tavern: The Tbilisi Avant-Garde at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York (in collaboration with Nana Kipiani). From 2008 to 2013, Baumann ran the Basel exhibition space New Jerseyy together with Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti, and Dan Solbach. He was the curator of the 2013 Carnegie International at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, along with Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski. He is a contributor to magazines such as artforum, Frieze, Piktogram, Spike, et al. Daniel Baumann is the Director of Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland, since 2015.

Gabriel Abrantes, born in North Carolina, United States, in 1984. His films have premiered at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs and Semaine de la Critique - Cannes, Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, the Venice Biennial, and the Toronto International Film Festival. They have been distinguished with a number of awards, including the Grand Prix at the Semaine de la Critique, the EFA prize at Berlinale, the Golden Leopard at Locarno Film Festival, and the EDP Young Artist Award. His work has been exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Britain (London), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Boston), the Kunst Werke (Berlin) and Serralves Museum (Porto). He participated in the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, the 2016 Bienal Tropical, and the 2014 Bienal d’Image Mouvement. His work has been shown in retrospective screening series at the Lincoln Center (New York) and BAFICI (Buenos Aires). He currently lives and works in Lisbon.