Christiane Berndes
Christiane Berndes is currently Curator and Head of Collections of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. She studied fine arts at the Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht) as well as art history at Utrecht University. She has since worked as an assistant curator at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam) and the Van Abbemuseum.She also is a member of the steering committee of the SBMK (Foundation for The Conservation of Contemporary Art).
As curator of collections, Berndes has organised several exhibitions of the museum’s collections: One on One (2004), Nederland niet Nederland (2004-5), What Happened to Art (2006) and Plug In; Re-Imagining the Collection (2006-2009). In 2010, she was the curator and project leader for Play Van Abbe, an 18-month project on the museum’s collections, during which exhibitions, commissions, projects, lectures, publications and a symposium will be presented. Christiane Berndes was a panelist for the debate The Slanted View about the practice of art criticism and the criteria of evaluation used by Dutch art institutions on 22 Oct 2009, realised in cooperation with Debate Centre Lux (Nijmegen), InterArt (Arnhem) and Framer Framed (Amsterdam).
Photography: Francien Jonge Poerink