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Wednesday 22 June, at 6.30 pm, was the presentation of the second cycle of international curators-in-residency at vessel: Raluca Voinea (Romania) and Annette Schemmel (Germany). The curators spoke about their personal background and curatorial experience.

Annette Schemmel first spoke about the necessity of maintaining optimism and enthusiasm about art and then transitioned into specific examples, from when she was at Munich Art Academy until her current exhibition and project plans. She outlined the evolution of her practice starting from her first exhibition, Salon, which took place in her apartment in Donnersbergerstrasse 42, Munich. Her most recent projects include coordination and curation of the newspaper project ‘ Present Perfect! ’ with Rotterdam-based production platform Enough Room for Space in collaboration with the Cameroonian artist newspaper di ARTgonale, featuring European and Cameroonian artists. In this way, she focused on elaborating on her current practice in relation to the notion of collaborative communal efforts.

She additionally used this outline as a means of illustrating the extension of the scope of her practice. From her “Salon” exhibition she was introduced to the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in order to contribute depth and meaning to a project. In de Appel’s Curatorial Program, she realized the importance of exposure to non-Western concepts of art.

Raluca Voinea used the talk as a platform to frame art as a method for interacting with the public in order to elicit political and social change. In 2006 she co-founded E-cart.ro, a non-profit Romanian cultural institution focused on cultural debates and public interventions. E-cart.ro co-organized the event The KNOT: Linking the Existing with the Imaginary, which took place in three cities, Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest, in 2010. This event was a mobile venue for artistic creation and production, functioning as a dynamic space for interaction, dialogue and exchange within the public sphere. The public was encouraged to participate in a variety of projects, which took place in pastel, inflatable structures, which resembled dissected Rubix cubes.

She additionally focused on the necessity of the curator as a mediator to include the public in art, which is becoming increasingly self-referential and subsequently widely inaccessible. To her, the notion of “public” is intangible, immensely context-dependent and constantly evolving. Art should work to go outside of established societal conventions in order to bring together a wide variety of communities via shared commonalities.

These curatorial presentations served as a platform for international conversation with the local public, integrating vessel’s aims of transnational dialogue with the curator’s elaborations of innovations in the curatorial field.