Sara Giannini
Sara Giannini is a curator, writer and educator based in Amsterdam. After studying theatre and semiotics in Italy, her birth country, she grew an interest in the interplays between language and performativity as tools of critical fabulations within different artistic practices. This somehow led her to contemporary art and to becoming a curator who rarely makes exhibitions. Since 2019 she is program curator with the arts organisation If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam, where she develops art and research commissions exploring the expansive field of performance and performativity.
Prior to her engagement with If I Can’t Dance, she worked for the Global Art and the Museum programme at the ZKM | Karlsruhe on a range of editorial and curatorial projects investigating the impact of globalization on the art world (2010–2013). As an independent curator, she has initiated long-term collaborative projects such as the VOLUME project (2013-14), a collective inquiry on the library led with 98weeks, Beirut, the web-publishing platform Unfold (since 2015), and Heterotropics (2018-19), a series of interventions on the traces of colonial history in the urban and cultural fabric of Amsterdam.
As a Fellow at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2016-17), Sara Giannini worked on aphasic language and scoring in relation to the archive(s) of René Daniëls. In 2018 she was a Curator in Residence at the Bard College Centre for Curatorial Studies (NY), where she has done research on the relationship between ecstasy, hysteria and non-identity. With artist Jacopo Miliani, she co-authored Whispering Catastrophe. On the Language of Men Loving Men in Japan (SelfPleasurePublishing, Milan, 2018) and with If I Can’t Dance she published Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo and the Undead ( 2021), a script of an absent event evoking the (not very benevolent) spirit of Italian actor, director and writer Carmelo Bene.
Sara held teaching positions at the Dutch Art Institute, KABK in The Hague, Das Arts, SNDO and Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. As a relatively new mother, she has become more and more interested in the questions posed by (the labour of) invisible performances. If life allows, one day she wishes to turn this interest into a research project titled Performances Not To Be Seen (courtesy Jeanette Ingberman & Exit Art, NYC).
Exhibitions
