Curators programme Art Rotterdam 2023

Alicja Melzacka

Function: Freelance curator and curator at Jester, Gent Country: Belgium Visiting period: 08 - 12 February Visiting year: 2023 Part of Curators programme Art Rotterdam 2023

Alicja Melzacka curates exhibitions and programmes and writes about contemporary art. She enjoys long-term, research-driven collaborations, in particular, with artists working on the intersection of literature, experimental writing, and (audio-)visual arts. She prefers writing to speaking, and she is curious about hybrid genres such as fictocriticsm, essay, or ekphrasis.

Her texts were published in artists’ books, exhibition catalogues, and art magazine. Recently, she curated and produced Hypertext Hotel at SB34 in Brussels (2022), which conceives of an exhibition as a collective work of interactive fiction. Since 2020, she has been working at Jester (f.k.a. CIAP and FLACC), where she curated, amongst others, solo exhibitions with Alexis Gautier (Riding High in the Reading Saddle, 2022), Marianne Berenhaut (Mine de Rien, 2021), and Beny Wagner and Sasha Litvintseva (A Demonstration, 2021), and where she is currently developing artistic trajectories with Jester’s residents.

Her past projects include Liquid Structures, a film and discursive programme co-curated with Nona Markarian within the scope of Batumi Urban Agenda (2022); Where Widowed Objects Meet Orphaned Ideas, a group exhibition at CIAP, Hasselt (2019); VIOLETS 3, Ghislaine Leung’s solo exhibition at Netwerk Aalst (2019); Art Au Centre, a series of presentations in the public space of Liège (2020-22), Letters from the South, an online project as part of the WRONG biennale (2020).  She holds a master’s degree in Arts and Heritage Studies from Maastricht University and a double bachelor’s degree in Art History and in Applied Linguistics from the University of Gdańsk. In 2019, she completed a postgraduate course in Curatorial Studies at KASK, Gent.