New artistic team

It is with great enthusiasm that Kunsthal Extra City announces the artistic team which, on the basis of the new mission, will over the next three years create the framework for the exhibitions and public programmes together with director Adinda Van Geystelen and Extra City’s staff.

Extra City departs from the city and connects back to it. It considers urban reality in all its facets as central to the challenges of the 21st century, and believes in the urgent need to actively build up a broader public engagement with contemporary art. It will be a hub for national and international, intercultural and interdisciplinary cooperation that reflects openly, across borders and through art, on a society in transition.

Considering the new role Kunsthal Extra City aims to have, Antonia Alampi, iLiana Fokianaki and Michiel Vandevelde have been chosen for their varied range of experiences and their shared interest in engaging with the city’s social texture. Together they will encourage new links between contemporary art, artists, researchers, and inhabitants of the city.

Extra City is committed to challenging existing organizational models; hence its own form is a collective model in the making, a process of repositioning that begun in 2016. The artistic team will also engage in rethinking and questioning the present role of the “kunsthal,” in artistic, organisational and social terms.

Antonia Alampi (Italy)
From 2012 to 2015 Antonia Alampi was curator of Beirut, an art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo. During this crucial time of transition in Egypt, Beirut made room to contemplate contemporary life from the position of art, and to provide a space of response, engaging with a local, regional and international community of artists, poets, writers, filmmakers, activists, architects, thinkers and students. Currently Alampi is a member of SAVVY Contemporary, a Berlin based project space that takes up the challenge of investigating the “threshold” between the West and the Non-West.
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iLiana Fokianaki (Greece)
In 2013, the curator and writer iLiana Fokianaki founded State of Concept Athens, the first non-profit gallery in Athens to promote, through solo exhibitions, international artists who have never exhibited in Greece, to give a platform to young Greek artists and to invite international curators to create exhibitions that comment on the current socio-political landscape of Greece and beyond. State of Concept is also focusing on an educational programme that enables Greek art students and artists to further their studies and develop their projects through free tutorials and feedback, as well as lectures and symposia.
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Michiel Vandevelde (Belgium)
Michiel Vandevelde has a hybrid profile: he is active as an artist and choreographer, curator (of live arts), writer and editor. In his work he investigates the elements that constitute or obstruct the contemporary public sphere. He explores which other social, economic and cultural alternatives we can imagine in order to question, challenge and transform dominant logics and ways of organizing. Vandevelde has been developing a variety of projects both in public space and in (performing) arts institutions.
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Save the date
On Saturday, May 20, during the Antwerp Art Weekend, the new artistic team of Extra City will be happy to introduce you to its new programme.

Inter City
In anticipation of its reopening on September 8, 2017, Kunsthal Extra City is opening its exhibition spaces with a selection of projects from different art schools.
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Press contact
For more information, please contact Lotte De Voeght, via lotte.de.voeght [​at​] extracity.org or T +32 (0)3 677 1655.