Ameli M. Klein is a curator, writer and lecturer specializing in the politics and poetics of cultural construction. In her work, she questions the continuing influence of the Enlightenment and its various manifestations on the collecting, exhibition and research practices of Western institutions. She focuses on a critical examination of 19th and 20th century attempts to categorize and classify culture in order to create pseudo-scientific methodologies. Tracing the continuation of such ideologies in contemporary identity politics, she explores how the museology of the Enlightenment and the belief that the appreciation of art shapes the moral and ethical character of the viewer informs contemporary curatorial practice. What mechanisms are used in cultural production to disseminate political, religious or cultural ideologies? How can we critically reflect on the instrumentalization of cultural work to maintain, legitimize and expand power structures? How can we confront our own biases in order to critically engage with the construction of cultural narratives and the notion of a binary truth?
Ameli M. Klein Klein is the director of the Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany. She has been a visiting Lecturer at the IZK Institute for Contemporary Art at the TU Graz, and at the Roaming Academy of the Dutch Art Institute, besides having been a visiting critic at the Design Department of the Royal Academy London. Klein was an EPIC Fellow at the AAMC Engagement Program for International Curators with Terra Foundation and Art Fund_ (2021) and has been invited to participate in the Anthropocene Campus Venice by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the HKW (2021), and in Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities at Frame Finland in Helsinki (2022). She previously was a Curator in Residence at the SCL, Shanghai Biennial (2019), the V-A-C Curatorial Lab Venice (2019/20), and artpace San Antonio (2020). Ameli has curated exhibitions and discursive programming at e-flux screening room NY, New York, the Magazzino Gallery of Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, the Stellwerk, Kassel, the Interference Archive New York, the ACFNY New York, Venice Independent Art Space, Venice, V-A-C Zattere, Venice, and Drugo More in Rijeka, besides others.
Recent speaking engagements include Kunst und Aktivismus in der Klimakrise: Zwischen der Bewegung und dem Museum (2023) for ICOM at MQ Vienna, Veni Etiam - Returning to the Biennale? (2022) at the Department of Art History and Theory, University of Art and Design in Linz, On Mediation (2022) at Stellwerk, Kassel Growing Resistance (2022) at AA Summer School, London Rewilding the Museum (2022) at Arken Museum Copenhagen and the School of Visual Arts of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen Curating the Archive? Strategies on the Intersection of Remembrance and Critical Engagement (2022) at Camera Austria and the University of Graz, Art Activism (2022) at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin The Automated Condition (2022) at Princeton University and the University of Graz, Princeton NJ, (Art) Tourism as Spectatorship (2022) at The Association of Art Museum Curators, NYC, Rethinking Tourism Towards New Paradigms of Repair (2022) at Filodrammatica with Drugo More, Rijeka, Art Exhibitions and Ecological Thinking (2021) at Aarhus University, Aarhus, and Cultural Mass Tourism and its Historical Context (2021) at An Archipelago of Connectivity: Port-Cities, Hinterlands, and Islands in the Modern Mediterranean DFG Research Network at Università Ca‘Foscari; Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venedig, Venice.
Recent publications include How Many Voices Does It Take to Form a Choir? Jasmina Cibic’s Anti-Systemic World-Making, Camera Austria September 2024, Reclaiming Abundance in Fokus: Klima Kultur Europa des BMKÖS mit Oliver Ressler, September 2024, and Property Will Cost Us the Earth for the catalog of Barricading the Ice Sheets that accompanied Oliver Ressler's solo exhibition series at Camera Austria, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, n.b.k. – Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Tallinn Art Hall, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, and The Showroom, London. With essays by Antonio Negri, Doreen Mende, TJ Demos, Nora Sternfeld, Anja Steidinger, Marco Baravalle, Macarena Gómez-Barris, and Andreas Malm. Published with Buchhandlung Franz und Walther König, Cologne.