curator in residence June 2016 - May 2017

PS² happily welcomes our new curator in residence: Mirjami Schuppert.
For one year she will use the backspace of PS² for independent curatorial research and critical interference into our programming. The residency includes to plan and organise one project for PS². The Finnish curator, based in Belfast, was selected through nominations by the 5 members of Household, the previous curators in residence.

Curator/s in residence programme

2011  About curating, three week long research project
2012/13  PRIME collective, Alissa Kleist, Tonya McMullan, Charlotte Bosanquet
2012/13  Ursula Burke
2014/15  Household collective, Sighle Bhréathnach-Cashell, Eoin Dara, Ciara Hickey, Alissa Kleist, Kim McAleese
2016/17  Mirjami Schuppert
2018/19  Jane Morrow

So far the experience and impact of the residencies for PS² has been great. The curators organised talks, held peer reviews, developed their own projects and programmes for other spaces, cooked, realised full blown projects for PS², constituted themselves as an organisation, applied for funding, stored bikes, left empty cups and stirred up the place and- even better- our minds.

Mirjami Schuppert is a curator based in Belfast. Having graduated with an MPhil in Cultural History from University of Turku in 2008, she successfully completed a practice-based PhD in curating, funded by the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Scholarship, at the University of Ulster, Belfast. Her research explored the critical potential of artistic interventions into photographic archives and the curator’s role in this process.
The focus of her curatorial practice is commissioning new context and site-specific works. At the core of the commissions is collaborative production, where the participants help each other, and she sees the role of the curator as an active co-producer rather than a passive administrator. Contemporary curators should be involved in the contemporary art world as critical participants. The potential of curatorial practice lies within the varied role of the curator as a facilitator, mediator, but also initiator. In her practice, Schuppert has developed a dialogical curatorial model and focused on the working relationship between the curator and artists. Schuppert is interested in time and its cyclicality; how the past, present and future coexists in and through the works of art. In this note, she considers critical curatorial practice as an open, slowly evolving process that is willing to experiment and develop initiatives with unforeseen outcomes.
Schuppert has curated internationally, including exhibitions ‘Contacts from the archive’ (Belfast Exposed, Belfast, 2010), ‘World’s End’ (OKK|Raum29, Berlin, 2013), ‘Glimpses of the Unattainable’ (Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, 2014, ‘How to Show?’ exhibition and residency project (Berlin, 2014), and Archive Play (Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2014). She has co-edited as well as contributed to art publications. She is a member of Ulster Research Salon, and co-founder of EGFK, European Society for Art and Research.