Ute Meta Bauer, Associate Professor/Director

Profile
Work
Publications
- Editor
- Video and Filmography
- Press, Reviews, and Contributions

Contact Info
Room: N51-334
Please contact Ute through
the Visual Arts Program office:
Telephone: (617) 253-5229
Send e-mail

Office Hours
tba

Lecture Series blogs:
http://urbanutopias.mit.edu/
http://www.zonesofemergency.net/
http://collision.mit.edu

Profile

Ute Meta Bauer is Associate Professor and Director of the Visual Arts Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge). She was born in Germany, and educated as an artist at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg (Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg), where she received her Diploma with Honors in Visual Communication/Stage Design in 1987. She has been working ever since as a curator for exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. She has served as director for various art institutions and as well as advisor for a number of high-profile cultural boards, such as the chairwoman of the Art Advisory Board of the Goethe Institutes, as a member of the International Scientific Board of the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, and most recently she was nominated as a member of the International Committee of the 3rd Yokohama Triennale 2008.

Since 1985, Ute Meta Bauer has worked as free-lance curator and editor of publications in the field of contemporary art and mediation of art, amongst them, Education, Information, Entertainment. New Approaches in Higher Artistic Education (Vienna 2001). She has been a founding editor/publisher of the art periodicals META 1 - 4 (Stuttgart 1992-94), case (Barcelona 2001, Porto 2002) and Verksted # 1- 6 (Oslo 2003-2006). Furthermore she is on the Advisory Boards of the magazines After All (Great Britain), and brumaria as well as of Apostrophe (both Spain).

From 1996 until 2006, she held an appointment at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as Professor of Theory, Practice and Transfer of Contemporary Art. During that time she has also served as Head of the Institute of Contemporary Art (1996-2001) and as Head of the Institute for Art and Cultural Science (2003-2005). In 2002 - 2003 she held the position of the Vice Rector and has been in charge of the International Affairs of the Academy.

Bauer was the Founding Director of the Norwegian Office For Contemporary Art Norway from 2002 to 2005, a private foundation initiated by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Church and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop collaborations in contemporary art between Norway and the international art scene. She served as the commissioner for the Scandinavian Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia in 2003, and as commissioner for the Norwegian contribution for the Bienal de São Paulo in 2004. At OCA she established the Edvard Munch Prize, the highest award for contemporary art in Norway. She co-founded along with Tom Remlov of the London based OCA International Trust, a charity to support innovative artistic projects that engage in the notion of civil society in different parts of the world.

Focusing on art, architecture and sound linked to feminist and socio-political discourses, her curatorial work includes most recently the conception, organization and realization of the Mobile_Transborder Archive on transborder issues as a scenario project for inSite 05 San Diego (USA)/Tijuana (MEX) in 2005.

From 2003-2004, Bauer was also Artistic Director of the 3rd berlin biennial for contemporary art, a broad international spectrum of visual, urban, cinematic, performative and sonic stagings, that took place over the course of two months; her focus was on Berlin as a new capital fifteen years after the wall came down.

She co-curated Documenta11, on the team of Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor. Documenta takes place every five years in Kassel (Germany) and enjoys a reputation as the exhibition that provides the broadest overview of contemporary art worldwide. Its five thematic platforms took place at various sites such as Vienna/Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia, Lagos and Kassel and involved more than 200 artists, filmmakers and speakers of various fields, accompanied by a series of eight publications.

In 2001 she made exhibitions such as First Story - Women Building/New Narratives for the 21st Century for the European Cultural Capital Porto 2001 commissioned by the Art and Architecture Department and she curated the exhibition Architectures of Discourse for the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.

As Artistic Director at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart e.V. from 1990 to 1994, she was responsible for numerous exhibitions, lectures and international conferences such as A new spirit in curating? (1992) and Radical Chic (1993).