JURY OF THE 12TH INTERNATIONAL ARTE LAGUNA PRIZE

Igor Zanti was born in 1973 in Milan. He graduated in modern literature at the University of Milan with a thesis on the Medieval and Modern Art History about painting in fifteenth century in Lombardia.
For several years he carries out different activities as a critic and curator of contemporary art and applied arts exhibitions, in collaboration with private galleries, institutional spaces in Italy and abroad. Since 2006 is curator and head of the jury of interational Arte Laguna Prize.
Artist consultant for Undergallery cultural association in Daverio (Varese) and for the International Art Club in Lugano. In 2008 he was the artistic director of the Brolo Museum – Art and Culture Centre in Mogliano Veneto (Treviso). In early 2008, he conceived the project New Art for defining and promoting the New Pop movement in Italy. He was the curator of 2009 and 2010 editions of Ceres for Art prize. In 2010 he was the co-curator of the international fair AAM supported by Arte Ispe Dixit of Como and Geneva. At the beginning of 2011, on behalf of MAE, of the Italian Embassy in India and the Italian Cultural Institute in New Delhi he was the curator of the Dadaumpop, a retrospective of italian neo pop, exhibited in Mumbai, Kolkata and New Delhi. He works on promotional project of Indian art and Italian art in collaboration with Kanchi Metha, curator of the Indian Pavillion at th Prague Biennale.He teaches Visual Communication and Contemporary Art Phenomenology at the IED College of Milan. He writes on Espoarte magazine, on Lobodilattice webzine and collaborates with InsideArt Magazine. Since 2013 he is the IED Venezia director.

Curator and editor Domenico de Chirico, born in Bari in 1983, lives and works in Milan. From 2011 until 2015 he taught courses in Visual Culture and Trend Research at Milan’s European Institute of Design (IED). He collaborates with numerous international galleries, artists and magazines. In 2016 he has been appointed as artistic director of DAMA Fair, Turin.

She works as a freelance curator, obstinately and she is obsessed about two things: disseminating contemporary art among the general public, which means creating a “mass avant-garde”, and finding emerging talents –among her “discoveries” there are Nathalie Djurberg and Ragnar Kjartansson, while she was the curator of the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2004. Thanks to her wide and inclusive view, she is able to fulfill the role of artistic director in different realities such as an institutional pavilion like Expo Gate, for Milano Expo in 2015, and IL CREPACCIO project, a showcase in Milan for young artists and not just them,(recently on Instagram with IL CREPACCIO INSTAGRAM SHOW @ilcrepaccio), she is a curator of exhibitions – such as the latest solo exhibition of Thomas Braida at Palazzo Nani Bernardo for the Venice Biennale 2017 – and of public projects for companies and international institutions like Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Performa in New York. She writes for different magazines including Flash Art and Living (Corriere della Sera), Vogue Italia and Domus.

Artistic director of CASA DEI TRE OCI in Venice and artistic director of the Festival of Photography in Capri. Editor in Chief of the Monthly IL FOTOGRAFO. Consultant of Fondazione di Venezia for the management of photographic heritage. Founder of Still – photography, showroom and gallery www.stillfotografia.it. From 2005 to 2014 director of Contrasto – Milan and vice president of Fondazione Forma in Milan.
In the past, artistic director of the Festival of Photography in Savignano sul Rubicone, of the International Biennial of Photography in Turin. For over 15 years, a journalist and photography critic for Vivimilano and Corriere della Sera. Expert in the photography collecting market, in the years 2002-2003 curator of the first photographic auctions at Sotheby’s in Milan.
From 1995 to 2002 director of the Italian Foundation for Photography. In the 1990s director of the School of Photography at the European Institute of Design IED in Turin.
Curator of photographic exhibitions and author of several books about photography, among these, Collezionare Fotografia of 2010 (with a new edition in 2013), published by Contrasto.

Nicolangelo Gelormini | Arte Laguna Prize

Born in Naples, he graduated at the Experimental Cinematography Centre after completing a degree in Architecture. He was the assistant of Paolo Sorrentino. His first direction was the videoclip “Vivi Davvero” for the singer Giorgia, thanks to which he was awarded a nomination at the Italian Grammy Award. In 2007 he collaborated with the artists Ariel Soulè and Simon Toparovsky for the project Qui del Dicibile, presented at Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In the same year he won Serata d’Onore, presented by Pippo Baudo, with the short film “Caro Benzina”, played by Milena Vukotic, Benimino Marcone and Nicola Nocella. Directing the short films about Casa Planchart by Giò Ponti in Caracas and about the buildings designed by Leonardo Ricci for Thomas Mann and Pierre Balmain he summarized his nature as a film director and an architect. He directed Reset, a short film played by Giovanni Ludeno and Carlo Cerciello, presented at Lincoln Center in New York and it was the winner of the famous Raindance Film Festival (London UK). In 2011 he started to work as an external professor at IED in Milan and at the Cinematography Experimental Centre in Milan, Palermo and L’Aquila and the PAN – Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli – dedicated to him a series of film projections as he collaborated with the master Luca Ronconi. In 2013 he exhibited the short film Contempo at the 55th Venice Biennale, a journey into contemporary art which led him to realise a series of spots for Notte dei Musei (Night of Museums) promoted by Mibac. In 2014 he directed the short films Irpinia Che Guarda il Mare with Andres Neumann, the famous producer of Pina Bausch, and Irpinia Madre, a depiction about Ettore Scola, Salvatore Ferragamo and Carlo Gesualdo with the participation of Toni Servillo and Roberto De Simone. In 2015 he dealt again with videoclips and at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival he presented the video of All the Things, a song written by David Lynch and performed by his muse Chrysta Bell. Among his latest works, the spot of MADRE Museum and in 2017 the art film Le Umane Paure, presented at MACRO in Rome.

Emanuele Montibeller | Arte Laguna Prize

Born in Borgo Valsugana in 1959, he founded Arte Sella in 1986, participating in the project’s creation and organization, promoting the foundation of the namesaked association and becoming its artistic director, a role that he is currently fulfilling. He was member and promoter of numerous cultural realities, he curated projects of cultural and artistic development in Italy and abroad.

Independent curator, since 2006 he has been working both in integrated public art projects and in crossover cultural projects. He was born in 1979 in Rome, he grew up in the Writing field and formed as an art historian, he decided to mix his urban art knowledge with his humanistic studies ideating and creating projects in which art and cities collaborate for a cultural innovation.
He curated and realised projects with some of the most important international urban artists: Blu, Momo, Agostino Iacurci, Borondo, Aryz, 108, Edoardo Tresoldi e Sten & Lex.
In 2014 he curated his first indoor exhibition: From Street to Art, the first group exhibition of Italian urban artists at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York dedicated to the discovery of the deep diversities and the different personalities of the national artistic scene.
The project that best represents Simone Pallotta is SANBA, ideated in San Basilio headquarter in Rome from 2014 to 2016.
He realised public art projects in the high security section of Rebibbia jail in Rome and for the Presidency of the Council he created art projects in 10 Italian schools to mark the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation over Nazi-Fascism.
He curated projects of urban creativity for the Municipalities of Rome, Civitavecchia and Turin.
He wrote for contemporary art magazines and he is one of the founders of Carlo Battaglia Foundation.
In Summer 2016 he wrote the critic text and he curated the installation of Edoardo Tresoldi in Manfredonia, the wire mesh artwork which represents the ancient early Christian Basilica in Siponto. Thanks to this work, in 2017, the prestigious Forbes magazine nominated the artist as one of the “30 under 30 influencers” in the art category.
Since September 2016 he has been collaborating with Circus, in Milan, a reality born as a society for photographic services which now aims for the fusion between the profit world and social cultural projects.

Nadim Samman is a curator and art historian. He was Co-Curator of 1st Antarctic Biennale (March 2017) and The Antarctic Pavilion (Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2014; Art, 2015, 2017). He is currently Co-Director of Import Projects, Berlin. Nadim read Philosophy at University College London before receiving his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 2012 he co-curated the 4th Marrakech Biennale. Recent projects include Treasure of Lima: A Buried Exhibition (a unique site-specific exhibition on the remote Pacific island of Isla del Coco) and Rare Earth (a major group exhibition at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna). In 2016 he was Curator and Artistic Director of the 5th Moscow International Biennial for Young Art. In 2014 Foreign Policy Magazine named him among the ‘100 Leading Global Thinkers’.

Manuel Segade has a BI in History of Art from the University of Santiago de Compostela. His dissertation was a review on theatricality and allegorical linguistic structures in the sculpture from the 1980s through the work of Juan Muñoz. Since 1998 he works in fragments of a cultural history of aesthetical practices of the end of the XIXth Century, around the production of a somatic and sexualized subjectivity, about what he published the essay “Narciso Fin de Siglo” (Melusina, 2008).
In 2005 and 2006 he served as content coordinator for the Metrònom Fundació Rafael Tous d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona. From 2007 to 2009 he was a curator of the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela. In 2009 he resumed his freelance activity producing and curating projects for La Casa Encendida, ARCO, MUSAC or Centre d’Art La Panera in Spain, Pavillon Vendôme in France or TENT in The Netherlands. He has also been teaching curatorial practices in different postgraduates and MA programs, as in Honours in Curatorship of Michaelis University of Cape Town or the Independent Studies Program of MACBA in Barcelona, and now being the annual tutor professor of École du Magasin in Grenoble.
In his last projects tries to offer gestural approaches to curating as other ways of discursive distribution, in formats of pedagogy and education and in curatorial actions close to performance.

Ekaterina Shcherbakova | Arte Laguna Prize

Ekaterina Shcherbakova is an independent curator, based in Paris. She holds MA from the Department of Cultural Studies of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow and MA of the Art Department of the University of Paris 8 (2016). In 2012-2013 she took part in the Session 22 of the curatorial training program École du Magasin (Grenoble, France). She is currently a PhD researcher at University of Paris 8. In 2015-2016 she curated a year-long program at the gallery La Box (Higher National School of Art Bourges, France), in 2016-2017 at the art space Le Grand Cordel (Rennes, France). Ekaterina Shcherbakova was nominated for Young Curators Prize (2014) by The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow). She was a co-curator of the Russian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. Participated in conferences and delivered speeches at the Higher National School of Art (Bourges, France), Grenoble-Valence Higher School of Art and Design, and the National Institute of the History of Art (Paris). Author of articles in exhibition catalogues and periodicals, including Logos, Aesthetica Magazine, The Calvert Journal, Peeping Tom’s Digest, etc.

Eva Wittocx is an art historian, curator and writer based in Brussels. She was a curator at S.M.A.K. museum of contemporary art in Ghent from 1997 to 2006, where she organized numerous exhibitions, including Dora Garcia: Code inconnu, Orla Barry: Portable Stones, Dirk Braeckman, Luigi Ontani and Joëlle Tuerlinckx. She coordinated the exhibition Luc Tuymans: Mwana Kitoko at the Belgian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2001 (curator: Jan Hoet). Between 2006 and 2009, she served as curator at the STUK arts centre in Leuven, with solo exhibitions by Matt Mullican, Keren Cytter, Adrian Paci, Guillaume Leblon, Candice Breitz and others. In 2007 she launched the annual performance festival Playground – a collaboration since 2010 between STUK and M Museum and part of the performance network Corpus. In 2009 she was appointed Senior Curator at the newly opened M-Museum Leuven, where she developed the institution’s contemporary art programme focusing on solo exhibitions by both emerging and established artists. She curated shows at M by Mika Rottenberg, Dirk Braeckman, Guy De Cointet, Sol LeWitt: Walldrawings (with Béatrice Gross),Markus Schinwald, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh and many others.
Eva Wittocx regularly writes about contemporary art. She is the author of texts on Ugo Rondinone, Peter Buggenhout, Walter Leblanc, Tina Gillen and Germaine Kruip and is currently President of the Belgian section of AICA and of the Art committee of the Flemish Parliament’s collection. In July 2016 she was nominated as curator to represent Belgium together with artist Dirk Braeckman at the Belgian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale.