DaWire

Colombian curator José Roca will be the Chief Curator for the 8th Mercosul Biennial to take place in 2011 in Porto Alegre, Brazil between the months of September and November. Since its inception in 1994, the Mercosul Biennial has focused on Latin American artistic production without forgetting the importance of maintaining an international scope. According to Roca, “If we understand the Biennial as a project of long-term cultural policy, it is logical that its positioning strategy so far has been from the outside in. Since we have reached this international positioning, we are at the right moment to intensify relations with local production, particularly the Brazilian one, Rio Grande do Sul and Porto Alegre.”[...]

I met Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro at the Americas Society in New York City about ten years ago, where we were both working as a part of the Culture Program; he was the Director of the Visual Arts Program and I was Editorial Assistant for the journal Review. Since his position at the Americas Society, Gabriel has been Curator at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Chief Curator of the Sixth Edition of the Mercosul Biennial and currently Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection in New York.

Since DaWire’s inception, an essential component of the project has been the creation of a forum where issues relevant to curatorship could be discussed. With this idea in mind, I interviewed Gabriel on curating, Latin American art and other tricky topics.[...]