About Barbara Steiner
Dr. Barbara Steiner (* 1964 in Dörfles, AT) is an art historian, freelance curator, author and publisher. She studied art history at the University of Vienna, completing post-graduate studies in Museum and Exhibition Curators at the State Academy for Lower Austria in Krems.
In the 1990s Steiner ran the Art Associations (Kunstvereine) in Ludwigsburg and Wolfsburg, where she curated exhibitions with Liam Gillick, Angela Bulloch, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Karen Kilimnik, among others. From 2001 to 2011 Steiner was Director of the Foundation Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig (GfZK), where she co-curated solo exhibitions with Jun Yang, Christine Hill, Deimantas Narcevicius and the Atelier Le Balto, as well as group exhibitions such as Performative Architektur, The future is not what it used to be and Schrumpfende Städte. From 2012 to 2013 Steiner took over the artistic direction of the transnational project Europe (to the power of) n, a series of exhibitions of the Goethe Institute, which took place in London, Minsk, Łódź, Istanbul, Oslo, Novi Sad, Brussels, San Sebastián, Beijing and Taipei.
In 2014 Steiner began the project Freunde und Komplizen in Vienna’s Künstlerhaus, which was continued in the VMKÖ (2015/16) und der Secession (2016/17). This asks how from the perspective of art one can respond to economic processes, and also how a participant in the field of art can act in business without losing sight of a sense of community and the common good.
In academic teaching Barbara Steiner has also gathered a wide experience: since 2015 she has been deputy professor for Cultures of the Curatorial at the University for Graphics and Book Art in Leipzig; previously she was in charge of courses at the University of Linz, the University of Art Braunschweig, the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen and the University for Applied Art in Vienna.
Besides monographs of artists including Jorge Pardo, Christine Hill, Superflex, Liam Gillick or Josef Dabernig, Barbara Steiner published a series of theme-related books on topics such as the museum, concepts of space, the relationship between private and public, and on art and the economy, including: Mögliche Museen (with Charles Esche), Cologne 2007; Spaces of Negotiation (with as-if wienberlin), 2010; Das eroberte Museum, 2011; Scenarios about Europe, 2012, and The Europen-Book, 2013. In the same year, in cooperation with BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, TOPOTEK 1 and Superflex, a comprehensive book appeared on Superkilen, which depicts various cultural perspectives, taking as an example the large-scale park in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro.
Barbara Steiner is also very well connected internationally, with good contacts maintained in the countries of eastern Europe above all. She realised the exhibition Collection Reversed: Transfer, Transformation and Ruptures in the Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti (Slovenj Gradec), which is part of the EU-funded project Performing the Museum (Muzej v gibanju) and to which the MSU Zagreb, the Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine in Novi Sad and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona also belong.
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Christoph Pelzl & Anna Fras