Lorenzo Graf
Curator

Exhibitions
Writing
About

WRITING

Mad Space
Dissertation
Goethe University
2024-ongoing

My dissertation project focusses on spatial practices in contemporary art emerging in the context of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation from the late 1970s. How did changes in mental health politics reorganise the built environment on a perceptual level? In what manner did artistic practices register and react to this shift? What artworks emerged that would allow for spatial experiences diverging from psychonormative orientations?

Front cover of the exhibiton catalogue of “Sculpture on Shoreline Sites” on Ward’s Island, New York, New York, 1983-1984. © Artist Representing Environmental Art, Inc.

Keine leichte Sache. Lin May Saeed in der GAMeC
Review
Passe-Avant
2024

Travelling through the Northern mountains of Italy, I payed a visit to the newly launched cultural program of GAMeC—Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo. In a close-up onto the work of German-Iraki artist Lin May Saeed (1973–2023), centerpoint of the parcours, I reflect on the project’s title and conceptual intent of "Thinking Like a Mountain".

Lin May Saeed, The Liberation of Animals from their Cages III, 2008. Image courtesy of the Estate of Lin May Saeed & Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main. Photography: Jens Heine

Strudel and Melancholia. Re-reading the 9th Biennale Gherdëina
Review
Passe-Avant
2024

In this review, I look for traces of melancholia in the artistic works of the 9th Biennale Gherdëina in Val Gardena, South Tyrol. The piece asks how some of the works reflect critically on ecological processes in relation to human presence and ecotourism - particularly in the context of a biennial in the midst of nature.

Janis Rafa, Landscape Depressions, 2023. Film still, single-channel video with sound, 25 min. Courtesy the Artist © Janis Rafa

Dreaming Buried Promises Anew at the 35th Ljubljana Biennale
Review
Passe-Avant
2023

Co-written with Zishi Han, this review untangles the continuities between the history of the Biennale of Graphic Arts and the latest edition curated by Ibrahim Mahama.

Kagiso Patrick Mautloa, Rolling Trolley, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Bag Factory Artists’ Studios

Sonic Tractions
Master’s thesis
Goethe University, Städelschule
2023

Sparked by Tirdad Zolghadr’s Realty (Hatje Cantz, 2022), this practice-led research focuses on the sound art by Ultra-red and Emeka Ogboh. Linking their urban interventions with ongoing struggles against gentrification in Berlin and Lagos, this paper carves out the potential for sound to move beyond the representative domain, and to nurture “tractions” capable of countering dispossession and infrastructural privatisation.

Awarded with the Cellini-Preis 2024.

Yaba bus parks in Lagos. Foto: Lorenzo Graf

Every Breath You Take
Interview with Alice Morey
Passe-Avant
2020

On the occasion of her solo exhibition at Hošek Contemporary, Alice Morey engages in a conversation on her practice.

This website uses cookies. Find details under Cargo Collective's Privacy Policy.