Mumbai-born curator and writer Zasha Colah has been chosen to curate the thirteenth Berlin Biennale, set to take place in the summer of 2025. Earlier this year, Colah was appointed co-artistic director, along with Francesca Verga, of ar/ge kunst Bolzano in northern Italy. Province of South Tyrol.
Raised in Zambia and India, Colah was Curator of Modern Indian Art at the JNAF/CSMVS Museum and Curator of Public Programs at the National Gallery of Modern Art, both in Mumbai. In 2010, she co-founded the Mumbai-based Clark House Initiative alongside Yogesh Barve, Sachin Bonde, Poonam Jain, Prabhakar Pachpute, Amol K Patil, Rupali Patil, Nikhil Raunak and Sumesh Sharma. The collaborative effort between curators and artists, which ended in 2022, focused on freedom issues and drew inspiration from organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Fluxus Group as well as artists such as AA Raiba, Joseph Beuys, Frantz Fanon, and Nil Yalter, and political reformers BR Ambedkar and Cheikh Anta Diop.
In 2014, Colah began splitting his time between Mumbai and Berlin. In 2016, she curated the “body luggage” exhibition in Graz, the steirischer herbst festival in Austria. The following year, she was co-curator, with Luca Cerizza, of the Third Biennial of Pune in India, “Habit-co-Habit. Artistic simulations of some everyday spaces in India. Since 2017, she has been based in Turin, Italy, during which time she was part of the curatorial team for the second Yinchuan Biennale in China, “From the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge”, in 2018. That same year, she took on the role of lecturer in curatorial studies at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, where she still teaches. In 2020, she obtained her doctorate at Sapienza – Università di Roma; her thesis explored illegality and meta-exposure practices in Indo-Myanmar from the 1980s. Also in 2020, she joined Archive, a decentralized community of practice with members in Berlin, Dakar and Milan, under the auspices of which it co-organizes exhibitions.
