FEINART Lecture Series | Vessel: a Meridian Practice

In this lecture Viviana Checchia and Anna Santomauro will present a collective engaged curatorial practice beyond the usual schemes: situated but nomadic; responsive but not embedded; institutionalised but not normalised.

This practice has been developed during the past 10 years within their intellectual and emotional Vessel, a nomadic research-led agency and curatorial organisation. Vessel is a platform for critical discussion surrounding the cultural, social, economic and political change created through community-based work, based in Puglia, Italy.

Vessel has devoted great attention to the definition and development of socially-engaged art practice and contributed internationally through the application of socially-engaged tools and methods in contemporary curatorial practice, always from a perspective other than the mainstream.

In this lecture the curators and co-founders of Vessel Viviana Checchia and Anna Santomauro will share some ideas and examples of how that was possible through public programming, commissioning and writing.

You can register for this event here.

Bio
Viviana Checchia is a curator, critic and lecturer active internationally. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand. Previous to this role she was Public Engagement Curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art: Glasgow (CCA). Prior to taking up her role at CCA, Viviana produced and contributed to a range of international projects, including the Young Artist of the Year Award 2014 (YAYA) in Ramallah and the 4th Athens Biennale. For the past ten years, Viviana has co-directed Vessel, a platform for critical discussion surrounding the cultural, social, economic and political change created through community-based work, based in Puglia, Italy.

Anna Santomauro is a curator, educator and researcher in micropolitics and socially engaged art. In 2017 she joined Arts Catalyst as Curator. In 2011, Santomauro co-founded Vessel in Bari, Italy, a non-profit arts organisation dedicated to public programming in relation to contemporary social, political, and economic issues. Between 2015 and 2018 Santomauro was Public Programmer at Eastside Projects (Birmingham) and curator-in-residence at Grand Union (Birmingham). Santomauro was one of the recipients of ICI/Dedalus Research Award. She attended several curatorial courses such as GBICC 2012 organized by the Gwangju Biennial, ICA Summer Seminar in Yerevan (Armenia), ICI – Independent Curators International Seminar in Istanbul, and is member of IKT.