Briefing

Julia Gonnella has been named by Qatar Museums as the new director of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. Gonnella was formerly head curator at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, and is a trained archeologist who has worked in El Bahnasa, Egypt and Raqqa, Syria. She coordinated the German-Syrian project to excavate the Citadel of Aleppo from 1996 to 2011.

The second edition of the Freelands Prize, established last year by Elisabeth Murdoch, has been awarded to Lis Rhodes and Nottingham Contemporary to allow the artist and filmmaker to stage an exhibition at the institution in 2019. The award is an annual GBP£100,000 fund for exhibitions by mid-career female artists, at regional institutions outside of London. The artist receives GBP£25,000 of the prize. This year's jury was made up of Camden Arts Centre director Martin Clark, as well as its outgoing director Jenni Lomax, the curator Teresa Gleadowe and artist Cornelia Parker. Rhodes, born in 1942, was a key figure in 1970s independent filmmaking movement, with a focus on intersections between feminist theory and cinema (she was also cinema curator at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op from 1975 to 1976), but her last solo show was at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 2012. ‘Her work spans from abstract film and expanded cinema to video-essays. Her multifaceted practice has influenced generations of artists, not to mention curators, musicians and writers,’ Sam Thorne, director of Nottingham Contemporary and frieze contributing editor, told The Art Newspaper.

Susanne Pfeffer has been announced as director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst. She will be replacing Susanne Gaensheimer. Pfeffer has headed up the Fridericianum in Kassel since 2013, and was curator of Anne Imhof's work at the German Pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennale, which took the Golden Lion.

The Ford Foundation has awarded USD$1.5 million to fund its ‘Art of Change’ fellowships, a programme which is dedicated to artists with socially progressive work, helping to ‘advance freedom, justice, and inclusion, and strengthen our democracy’ the foundation said in a statement. The fellows include conductor Gustavo Dudamel, composer Mohammed Fairouz and arts collective Postcommodity.

New York’s MoMA have promoted Ana Janevski to Curator of Media and Perfomance Art. Janevski was formerly associate curator, joining the museum in 2011. She co-organized the 2015 exhibition ‘Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection’. She will now oversee the media and performance programming for the museum’s Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed expansion.

Italian collector and philanthropist Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has announced a new city for her art foundation: the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid will open in 2019. The foundation will show works loaned from Turin’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (established in 1995), and will be situated in Nave 9 in the Centre for Contemporary Creation Matadero Madrid, a former slaughterhouse turned cultural centre, with architect David Adjaye signed up to renovate the building. ‘Madrid is a great European Capital, a bridge for Latin America, a continent the importance of which is widening on the contemporary art scene. I fell in love with the matadero’s magnificent space’, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo said in a statement.