A conversation with Bisi Silva and Ingrid Schaffner

Curators of the Carnegie International

Sunday 18 September, 2016, 7.30 pm, at Alice Yard

Please join us at an informal reception to meet curators Bisi Silva and Ingrid Schaffner, who also will speak about their respective work and the Carnegie International. 

Bisi Silva                                             Ingrid Schaffner

Bisi Silva (Lagos, Nigeria) is an independent curator and director/founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. She was Artistic Director of the 10th Bamako Encounters African Biennial of Photography (2015) in Mali, Co-Curator of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art in Greece (2009), and Co-Curator of the 7th Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennial (2006). She is the curator of Asiko (2010-) the pan-African roaming alternative art school. She co-curated The Progress of Love, a transcontinental collaboration between the Menil Collection (Houston), the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (Missouri), and CCA Lagos (2012–13) and J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere: Moments of Beauty at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2011). A frequent participant in international conferences and symposia, Silva has published in journals and art magazines including Artforum, Third Text, The Exhibitionist, and Art South Africa. She sits on the editorial/advisory boards of Art South Africa, N.Paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal, and Contemporary And. She was a member of the international jury for the Pinchuk Art Centre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014), as well as the 55th Venice Biennale (2013)

Ingrid Schaffner (Curator, Carnegie International, 57th edition, 2018) is an American curator, art critic, writer, and educator, specialising in art history. Prior to coming to Pittsburgh, she directed the exhibition programme as chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work often coalesces around themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms — especially Surrealism. She is the author of more than twenty books and nearly two hundred articles, reviews, and features, ranging from Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus to The Essential Andy Warhol, from an essay on exhibition wall text to an art history of chocolate. Born in Pittsburgh, Schaffner grew up in Los Gatos, California. She attended Mount Holyoke College and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Programme, where she was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow. She then received a master’s degree in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. After organising shows for the Drawing Centre, Swiss Institute, Haus der Kunst (Munich), Hayward Gallery (London), Independent Curators International, White Columns, and elsewhere, Schaffner was invited by then-director Claudia Gould to reshape and oversee ICA’s curatorial department.

out of place

Alice Yard • points in between • Granderson Lab September 2016

Out of Place, a curatorial collaboration between Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier and artist in residence Blue Curry, seeks to ask the following questions by instigating a series of events around Port of Spain:

How can we shift the encounter of visual objects or actions to more public spaces?

How can we alter or widen the way we understand the visual by dissolving received traditional boundaries between the object or action, its maker, and the viewer — untangling the idea of authorship?

How can we stage and engage the artistic process as a record of a creative or investigative action, as an experiential event available to everyone, rather than as a commodity, exclusively?

For announcements of events in the Out of Place programme, likely to be made on short notice, check the Alice Yard website or Facebook page.

Out of Place is part of YEAR X, a yearlong series of events reflecting on Alice Yard’s past and the possibilities of our future, running from September 2016 to September 2017.

Join us for the opening of

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September 2016 to September 2017

Alice Yard and Granderson Lab

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X = symbol to mark a specific location
X = sign for multiplication
X = an unknown variable
X = 10

In September 2016, Alice Yard marks its tenth anniversary as a space for conversation and experiment. Beginning in a modest Woodbrook backyard, our activities have gradually expanded through creating a small gallery space, residency quarters for visiting artists and curators, a bandroom used by dozens of musicians for rehearsal, and the adjunct space Granderson Lab in Belmont, home to a number of artists and creative collaboratives.

We began ten years ago with questions and possibilities. Our evolution has been organic and open-ended. As we consider our actions and ideas of the past decade, our instinct is less to celebrate and more to affirm our spirit of investigation and exchange, our ethos of generosity and independence.

As we prepare to begin our second decade, on Sunday 11 September, 2016, Alice Yard will host an installation by artist in residence Blue Curry, alongside September 2006, a modest exhibition drawn from our archives and documenting the moment of Alice Yard’s beginning ten years ago. We will also share details of a curatorial collaboration between Blue Curry and Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier, which will unfold over the coming month: a series of site-specific, public-domain projects by various artists, exploring questions of authorship, decision-making, and the artwork as event or action rather than object exclusively.

These activities will also open YEAR X, a twelve-month programme of projects and events that reflect on the archive of our past and the prospects of our future. We invite our collaborators, interlocutors, and friends to join us in imagining what might be possible in “a backyard on a small island.”


All are invited.

Souvenir, by Blue Curry (hair combs, perspex plinths, billboard posters) for VITRINE, 2014

“Artists, this space is available”

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Photograph by Nadia Huggins

“We wanted to see what was the range of creative disciplines that could be accommodated simultaneously, which is pretty much the way negotiations were forged in a traditional yard context in urban Trinidad.”

Alice Yard co-director Sean Leonard, on the influence of family generosity and Carnival productivity on his practice, and our decade-long experiment in this small backyard in Woodbrook — interviewed by Stephen Stuemplfe and published in the September/October 2016 Caribbean Beat.