Nanne Buurman is an art mediator, curator, and scholar.

She holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies/American Studies and a State Certificate (M.A. equivalent) in Art Education/English Teaching from Leipzig University, where she has also taught as an adjunct lecturer. Since October 2012 Buurman has been a doctoral candidate in the International Research Training Group 'Interart Studies' at Free University in Berlin. Within this programme, she was awarded a scholarship from the German Research Association (DFG) to pursue her dissertation. Entitled Performing Authorship in Curating, the project explores the interface of exhibiting, authorship, and gender. In 2013, Buurman spent the summer term as a visiting associate researcher at Goldsmiths College in London.

In addition to her academic commitments, she has worked for a number of art institutions, including documenta 12 (Kassel) and EIGEN+ART (Leipzig). Furthermore, assuming various authorial positions, Buurman was involved in numerous formats of cultural production, such as the art mediation project Arbeitslose als Avantgarde/The Unemployed as an Avantgarde (documenta 12 Kassel 2007), the exhibitions Welcome to the Ivory Tower! (Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, 2008), Facing the Eye (Independent Art Space D21 Leipzig, 2009), Featuring/Featuring (Gallery of Contemporary Art GfZK Leipzig, 2010), and recently the seminar Mediating Mediating (Leipzig University, 2012/13) as well as the catalogues Jack in the Box (2012) and Catalogue Raisonné (Clichés) (Spector Books, forthcoming 2013).

Performing Authorship in Curating (Working Title)

Since the so-called curatorial turn in the 1990s, curators of art exhibitions often receive more attention than the featured artists. With its focus on singular autonomous figures, the widespread notion of the 'curator as an artist' reproduces modernist conceptions of authorship unsuitable to account for the specific mediality of exhibitions. I assume that curatorial formats bear distinctive potentials to call into question ideas of intentional control, heroic myths of creation, and supposedly neutral display. Therefore, my research investigates the modes in which these potentialities become manifest in the field of curating. Informed by gender-studies approaches and debates on cultural agency, the aim of my dissertation is to explore how particularly relational conceptions of the curatorial may contribute to rethinking authorship in a way that acknowledges the complexities of cultural practices of meaning-making.

The project is supervised by Professor Dr. Klaus Krüger (Free University Berlin) and Professor Dr. Beatrice von Bismarck (Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig).