Rawad Baaklini (1994, Lebanon) is a curator and educator based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His practice is deeply informed by his multilingual background and an ongoing interest in translation as a curatorial method, exploring how meaning shifts, travels, and transforms across languages, mediums, and cultural contexts.
Over the years, he has collaborated with curatorial teams at institutions such as the Science Gallery Network, the Noorderlicht Photo Festival in Groningen, and the MIT Museum in Boston, among others.
He is the co-founder of ArtEra, an art platform at Erasmus Medical Center that brings together biomedical research and artistic practice within the public space of the hospital. His recent curatorial work includes projects developed with the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, TENT Rotterdam and MU Hybrid Art Space. Through exhibitions and public programs, he has explored subjects ranging from healthcare, ecology, and food cultures to desire, translation, hospitality, and the poetics of everyday life.
Alongside his curatorial practice, Baaklini teaches and mentors emerging artists and designers. He has taught at the Willem de Kooning Academy and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and has served as an external examiner and reader for several Dutch and international art institutions and universities. In 2022, he was awarded the Young Curator Award by Garage Rotterdam
Mentoring
There is still space for your own territory, even though countless good and sometimes brilliant examples have been handed down to us. My goal is to help you find that territory.
Of course, I want your work to find the form, scale, and audience that it deserves. But I am perhaps even more interested in the moments of doubt, hesitation, and uncertainty. The moments when you stop and ask yourself: Do I really need to do this?
I can already tell you that I believe the answer is yes.
What follows is a lifetime spent organizing yourself around that yes. We spend years circling it, questioning it, losing sight of it, and finding it again. Then, every so often, there is a brief and beautiful moment when we meet it directly and everything suddenly makes sense.
As a mentor, I am interested in accompanying artists through that orbit. Through moments of success and recognition, but also through periods of confusion, frustration, and searching. Perhaps my role is simply to help quiet that persistent voice that appears late at night and whispers that you would be better off doing something else.
Throughout my career as a curator and educator, I have worked with artists, designers, architects, researchers, scientists, and students at different stages of their development. What interests me most is not a single artwork, but the method that produces it: the particular way an artist connects observations, experiences, references, intuitions, and forms of knowledge. I believe this method is often more important than any individual work because it becomes the source from which many works can emerge.
My own practice moves between art, architecture, design, science, education, poetry and writing. I enjoy helping artists navigate and borrow from different fields without reducing their work to any one of them. Drawing unexpected connections often creates space for uncertainty, contradiction, unfamiliarity, and perspectives that do not immediately fit together. In my experience, this is often where the most interesting work begins.
I would like us to start with a series of studio visits so that I can experience your work firsthand and gain insight into the environment in which it is produced. From there, we can shape a mentorship trajectory tailored to your practice, interests, and ambitions.
Together, we will look for the questions that continue to generate new work long after a project is finished. More importantly, we will try to understand why those questions belong to you in the first place.