Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who has run Turin, Italy’s Castello di Rivoli since 2015, will retire at the end of 2023 after more than two decades of service to the institution, Jthe art journal reports. The museum has launched a search for her replacement, who would ideally take on the role in January 2024.
Among the exhibits Christov-Bakargiev has recently curated for the museum are those on digital artist Beeple, painter Giorgio de Chirico, “endurance” artist Anne Imhof, animator William Kentridge and filmmaker Hito Steyerl. With Marianna Vecellio, she co-organized the collective exhibition “Wartime Artists“, currently on the poster of the institution. A major study of the work of Michelangelo Pistoletto, honoring the artist’s ninetieth birthday, is set to open there later this year.
Christov-Bakargie was chief curator of the Castello di Rivoli from 2002 to 2008 and served as its acting director for a time. As director, she oversaw a major expansion of the museum, completed in 2019, which allowed it to incorporate the $570 million Francesco Federico Cerruti Collection into its holdings, making it one of the premier institutions in the world. contemporary art to support an encyclopedic collection. When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, hitting Italy particularly hard, it transformed the museum into a vaccination center, the first in Italy to serve this purpose.
Rewarded in 2019 by the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, awarded by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York, Christov-Bakargiev is particularly recognized for her work as artistic director of Documenta 13 in 2012. The edition the widely acclaimed event, usually held every five years in Kassel, under his leadership that year expanded to venues in Kabul, Afghanistan; Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt; and Banff, Canada.
From 2013 to 2015, Christov-Bakargiev was Edith Kreeger Wolf Emeritus Visiting Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Illinois. His previous roles include Senior Curator at MoMA PS1 in New York, Artistic Director of the Sixteenth Biennale of Sydney and Curator of the Fourteenth Edition of the Istanbul Biennale. Among the many works she has written are the book Arte Povera (Phaidon Press, 1999) and the inaugural monographs on artists Janet Cardiff and William Kentridge.
