Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024

Artistic Director

Ute Meta Bauer

Ute Meta Bauer (born 1958 in Stuttgart, Germany) is an educator and curator in the field of contemporary art. Since 2013, she has been the Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and a Professor in the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University. She currently co-chairs the Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices and is the Principal Investigator for the three-year research project “Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss.” Bauer was also a co-curator of Documenta11 (2002) on the team of artistic director Okwui Enwezor and served as artistic director for the 3rd Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2004). Together with Paul C. Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, she co-curated the US Pavilion at the 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015), featuring video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas, for which they received honorary mention for best national pavilion. Most recently she curated the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, presenting Shubigi Rao’s Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, and she was a curator of the 17th Istanbul Biennial alongside David Teh and Amar Kanwar (both in 2022).

Co-Curator

Anca Rujoiu

Anca Rujoiu (born 1984 in Bucharest, Romania) is a curator and editor with more than fourteen years of experience working in contemporary art in Western and Eastern Europe as well as the Asia-Pacific region. She was a member of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2013–18), first as Curator for Exhibitions and later as Head of Publications. In 2019 she was the co-curator of the third edition of the Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara, Romania. As a member of the curatorial initiative FormContent (2011–13) in London, United Kingdom, she co-initiated the nomadic program It’s Moving from I to It. More recent curatorial projects include the Inventory of the Week (2023), the National Center for Dance Bucharest, and Solidarity is a Verb (2022), Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany. Rujoiu is a PhD candidate at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; her research focuses on institution building, self-organization, and alternative ways of constructing and writing histories.

Co-Curator

Wejdan Reda

Wejdan Reda (born 1992 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) is the Founder of Sahaba, a Saudi-based art consultancy and research hub working with artists, galleries, and public institutions. Co-curator of the first Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2021), she also curated Intimate Dimensions (2020), a group exhibition exploring the notion of constructed spaces and built environments at Hafez Gallery, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In 2020 she was a Curatorial Fellow at Art Jameel, researching public art projects commissioned in Jeddah in the 1970s. She was also co-curator of Every Second in Between (2018), a large-scale public art commission by artist Kyung Hwa Shon in White City, London, United Kingdom. Initially studying architecture, Reda became interested in curating while pursuing her BA in Contemporary Media Practices at Westminster University, London, after which she returned to Saudi Arabia and worked in Athr Gallery, Jeddah (2015–16). Reda holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art (2018).

Co-Curator

Rose Lejeune

Rose Lejeune (born 1980 in Cheltenham, United Kingdom) is an independent curator based in London. In 2019 she founded Performance Exchange, a United Kingdom–wide program which works with commercial galleries and has established a network of museums to present and acquire performance works. She is also Curator for the Delfina Foundation’s Collecting as Practice, which engages with both historical museums and the future of collection development in a global context. Lejeune has worked internationally with organizations including Abu Dhabi Art, LOOP Barcelona, and OÖ Landes-Kultur Linz and was Program Lead for the British Council’s Art Criticism and Curatorial Skills Development program across the GCC. In the United Kingdom, Lejeune previously held curatorial positions at Serpentine Gallery and Art on the Underground among others. Currently, she is finishing a PhD in Curating at Goldsmiths College, focusing on the institutionalization and marketization of performance art.

Adjunct Curator

Rahul Gudipudi

Rahul Gudipudi (born 1987 in Jodhpur, India) is Senior Curator at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York, United States, where he oversees CARA’s programs across exhibitions, publications, and fellowships. He was previously Exhibitions Curator and later Senior Curator at Art Jameel (2019–23), leading on exhibitions and discursive-performative programs at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and at Hayy Jameel in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Previously, he was on the curatorial advisory and editorial boards for The New Alphabet School program (2019–22) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, Germany. He is currently on the advisory board of The Story Of, a foundation and transdisciplinary learning platform in Goa, India. He is also a board member of the Anthropocene Commons, a global research and response network organizing education and initiatives on climate change adaptation and collective action.

Co-Curator

Ana Salazar Herriera

Ana Salazar Herrera is a curator and founder of the Museum for the Displaced (2019–ongoing). She explores nomadic, polylinguistic, and transcultural subjectivities, proposing inventive questionings of hegemonic geopolitical mappings. Ana was Interim Curator at the Ludwig Forum Aachen (2022–23), and Assistant Curator at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2016–20). She was part of the pre-selection committee for the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo (2023); Curator-in-Residence (2021–22) at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Germany; a mentee of Project Anywhere (2020–21), and Shanghai Curators Lab Fellow (2018). She has an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a BA in Piano from Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, Portugal. Her writing has appeared in art magazines, exhibition catalogues, and academic journals.