Bassam el Baroni

Bassam El Baroni is a curator and an art critic based in Alexandria, Egypt. He is the co-founder, in 2005, of the non-profit art space Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), and its director from 2006 to 2012. El Baroni was co-curator of Manifesta 8, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2010, Region of Murcia, Spain for which he curated (with Jeremy Beaudry ACAF’s former associate curator) OVERSCORE; an exhibition project in three different venues in the cities of Murcia and Cartagena. Other exhibitions and projects include: When it Stops Dripping from the Ceiling (An Exhibition That Thinks About Edification), Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, 2012; Trapped in Amber – Angst for a Re-enacted Decade (with Helga-Marie Nordby), UKS, Oslo, 2009; Cleotronica 08, Festival for Media, Art, and Socio-Culture, Alexandria, 2008; You, Me, and The Trajectories of a Post-Everything Era, ACAF, Alexandria, and PROGR, Bern, Switzerland, 2005-2006; the ongoing online collaboration The ARPANET Dialogues (with Nav Haq and Jeremy Beaudry), 2010–present; and the publication Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou (2011). El Baroni is currently co-curating (with Anne Szefer Karlsen and Eva González-Sancho) the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) to open September 2013 in Vågan, Lofoten Islands, Norway. He has contributed texts to a variety of publications and has delivered papers at a wide range of conferences and symposia including: Museums Beyond The Crises - CIMAM Annual Conference, SALT, Istanbul, 2012; the 3rd FORMER WEST Research Congress, Beyond What Was Contemporary Art Part Two, Utrecht, 2012; dOCUMENTA 13, Cairo Seminar, 2012; Timing: On the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting, Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, 2012, and the Human Snapshot: Humanism and Universalism in Contemporary Art and Photography, Luma Foundation, Arles, France, 2011. In 2013, he will be directing a curatorial practice course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts.