User:Pressintern/Klaus Biesenbach

Klaus Biesenbach is Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Founding Director of KW (KUNST-WERKE) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.

Background Information
Biesenbach joined P.S.1 as Curator in 1996; in 2004 he was appointed Curator in MoMA's Department of Film and Media and became Chief Curatorial Advisor at P.S.1. He was named Chief Curator of MoMA's newly formed Department of Media in 2006, which was subsequently broadened to the Department of Media and Performance Art in 2009 to reflect the Museum's increased focus on collecting, preserving, and exhibiting performance art. As Chief Curator of the department, Biesenbach has led a range of pioneering initiatives, including the launch of a new performance art exhibition series; an ongoing series of workshops for artists and curators; important acquisitions of media and performance art; and the Museum's presentation in 2010 of a major retrospective of the work of performance artist Marina Abramović.

Among the recent exhibitions Biesenbach has organized at MoMA are: Performance 1: Tehching Hsieh (2009), Performance 4: Roman Ondák (2009), Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2008), Take your time: Olafur Eliasson (2008, with Roxanna Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography), Projects 87: Sigalit Landau (2008), Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers (2007, co-commissioned with Creative Time), and Douglas Gordon: Timeline (2006).

At P.S.1, he organized the exhibitions Disasters of War (2000), Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rate of Bodies and Values (2002), Into Me/Out of Me (2006), Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz (2007), Jonathan Horowitz: And/Or (2009), and 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009) (2009). He also co-organized Greater New York (2000 and 2005), and is currently working with a group of curators from MoMA and P.S.1 on the forthcoming Greater New York 2010 exhibition.

He has organized or co-curated many solo and group exhibitions internationally, including 37 Rooms (Berlin, 1992), Club Berlin: Venice Biennale (1995), Nach Weimar (Weimar, 1996), Hybrid Workspace at Documenta X (Kassel, 1997), Shanghai Biennale (2002), and Regarding Terror: the Red Army Faction-Exhibition (Berlin and Graz, 2005).

Biesenbach founded Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 1991, as well as the Berlin Biennale in 1996, and remains Founding Director of both entities. Under his artistic and executive directorship, KW and the Berlin Biennale were started as self-inventive intitiatives and are now federally and state funded institutions.