Five Curators to Watch in 2025
We look ahead to what five rising stars of the art world have planned this year
We look ahead to what five rising stars of the art world have planned this year
Jun Tirtadji
Jun Tirtadji has appeared in many ‘curators to watch’ lists since he co-founded ROH Projects, Jakarta, in 2014. Dedicated to increasing exposure for Indonesian artists, the gallery has gone from strength to strength in recent years, presenting their roster at art fairs such as Frieze Seoul, while maintaining a strong local programme. This April, Tirtadji will curate a large-scale exhibition with Tromarama, a collective of Jakarta- and Bandung-based artists – comprising Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans and Ruddy Hatumena – at Seoul’s SongEun Art and Culture Foundation. This is the second time Tirtadji has worked with the foundation, after curating a 2016 exhibition of the Indonesian photography collective MES 56.
Natasha Ginwala
Berlin- and Colombo-based curator, editor and writer Natasha Ginwala has had a busy few years. Alongside her regular gig as associate curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin, where she has organized surveys on artists such as Akinbode Akinbiyi and Zanele Muholi, and her role as artistic director of Colomboscope, Sri Lanka’s only contemporary art festival, she was co-artistic director of the 13th Gwangju Biennale with Defne Ayas in 2020 and curator of Contour Biennale 8, Mechelen, in 2017. In February, Ginwala will open the highly anticipated Sharjah Biennial 16. Led by a five-woman-strong curatorial team, this edition is titled ‘to carry’ and, according to the curatorial statement, will address ‘what it means to carry change and its technological, societal, animistic or ritualistic possibilities’.
Diana Campbell
Billed as one of the largest exhibitions of its kind in Central Asia, the Bukhara Biennial, which will open in September, is in safe hands with Diana Campbell, who has served as founding artistic director of the Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation since 2013, as well as curator of the 2014 and 2023 editions of Dhaka Art Summit. Committed to fostering a transnational art world, Campbell is the ideal choice for this interdisciplinary biennial, which will bring together international names, such as Antony Gormley and Wael Shawky, with local artists under the title ‘Recipes for Broken Hearts’. It will be fascinating to see how Los Angeles-born Campbell, who has predominantly worked in South Asia, responds to this new context and the responsibility of introducing Bukhara to the international art scene.
Mohamed Almusibli
It was somewhat of a surprise when Mohamed Almusibli was announced as Elena Filipovic’s replacement as the new director of Kunsthalle Basel in 2023. One of the most important noncollecting institutions in the DACH region, the Kunsthalle is a big step up for Almusibli, who previously co-founded and directed the little-known independent art space Cherish in Geneva. After releasing his programme for 2025, however, it’s clear that the Swiss curator will continue Filipovic’s legacy of supporting emerging artists while making the role his own. Highlights include solo exhibitions by Bagus Pandega, his first at a Europen institution, and Dala Nasser, who will be showing for the first time in Switzerland.
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Since taking over as director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2023, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung has produced a series of well-researched and sensitively curated exhibitions that aimed to redefine the German concept of Heimat (home), to account for the plural composition of the country’s population, where almost 30 percent of people have a migrant background. In September, Ndikung will open his edition of the São Paulo Biennial, one of the oldest and most prestigious biennials in the world, in what will be his first large-scale curatorial project in Latin America. Under the theme ‘Not All Travellers Walk Roads–Of Humanity as Practice’, the 36th edition, of which Ndikung is chief curator, will offer an opportunity, according to the curatorial statement, to ‘rethink what humanity could mean’.