Co-curator of Bruges Triennial 2024: Spaces of Possibility, Sevie Tsampalla, was finalising her PhD thesis in exhibition studies when she started working with Bruges Triennial in 2022. Her research builds on her long-standing interest in intersections of art, activism, exhibition making and public space, as well as involvement in collectives and biennials.
Using as case studies the 5-6th edition of Athens Biennale, OMONOIA (2015-2017) and documenta 14, Learning from Athens (2017) Sevie Tsampalla’s doctoral research looks at the tensions biennials inhabit in their effort to rethink themselves and their relation to the city, by learning from the collective governance that underpins commoning practices and common spaces. How do artists and curators negotiate the biennial as an exhibition that, through biennialisation, shapes power asymmetries in the art world? Can sharing and collectivising the exhibition open up possibilities for the biennial and the city to become a commons, even if temporarily so?
The research project was developed at Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool School of Art and Design, supported by the prestigious ‘Liverpool John Moores University VC Scholarship’, and supervised by Prof. Joasia Krysa (LJMU, curator of Helsinki Biennial 2023) and Dr. Michael Birchall (ERL Fellow & co-director of Migros Museum), and with Prof. Stavros Stavrides (The School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, GR) as an external supervisor.
Her thesis, entitled Commoning the biennial or the biennialisation of the commons? Examining how large-scale periodic exhibitions learn from urban common spaces. is now publicly available at https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/22005/.