TEXT ME

2023 • TEXT ME – Young Curators

A visit of young curators at LUNA Young Masters 2023

[Photo left to right, top row: Viktória Razina, Janet Sebri, Cyrine Ghrissi; bottom row: Gabriella Encheva and Zrinka Grula]

The TEXT.ME – Project

By Jan Herman de Boer, curator LUNA Young Masters 2023

Text Me is an intensive one-week program in which selected young curators from international backgrounds are offered the opportunity to dive deeper into the LUNA festival and closely engage with Young Masters’ artworks through writing. During and after their visit, each participant wrote a text about one of the artworks in the LUNA Young Masters exhibition, a show featuring 13 works by emerging artists at the core of the festival. The texts on this page are the results of this program.

The program was moderated by Aymen Gharbi. It consisted of workshops, excursions, a lot of writing and discussion session. These sessions on interviewing artists, the art context, diversity in art and the audience were provided by Bettina Pelz. The young curators discussed artistic approaches and the audience’s experiences with experienced artists, Gudrun Barenbrock, who also showed this year at LUNA Nights, and Nico Dardano, whose artwork was on show during LUNA Nights in 2021.

During this intensive program, the young curators were not only engaged in these workshops and discussions, but most of all, it allowed them to explore one or two artworks in the exhibition on a deeper level. They interviewed the artists and spend time with the artwork. The young curators provided each other with feedback on the results of their research and held co-writing sessions to perfect their texts and also learn from each other.

The five curators participating in the Text Me program have various specialist backgrounds. Where one examines from a technical perspective, another dives into the experiential, social or even historical aspects of an artwork. This diversity has led to cross-pollination on expertise, as seen in the texts.

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