13th KAUNAS BIENNIAL

Kaunas Biennial is delighted to announce the appointment of Josée Drouin-Brisebois as Curator for the 13^th Kaunas Biennial, which will take place on 12 November 2021 – 20 February 2022.

The next edition of Kaunas Biennial will be one of the most significant contemporary art events in Kaunas city, which will be the European Capital of Culture in 2022.

Drouin-Brisebois, the Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada, stated: “I am very excited about working with the Kaunas Biennial team and I look forward to our evolving collaboration. My aspiration for the Kaunas Biennial is to create meaningful encounters for visitors by presenting works of art that speak about humanity at this specific moment in time. I want to provide opportunities for visitors to explore new spaces in Kaunas that are rife with their own histories.”

Kotryna Žemaitytė, the director of Kaunas Biennial, commented on the appointment of Drouin-Brisebois: “The Biennial is the most popular contemporary art festival in the Baltic Countries and every edition of the event is created from scratch, i.e. by changing the character of exhibitions and the concept itself, and also by involving new partners, curators, artists and people working in different areas of culture for the common purpose: communication through the expression of art and creative processes. The 13^th Kaunas Biennial, under the curatorship of Josée Drouin-Brisebois, will embrace this purpose, bringing together Lithuanian and international artists to explore the theme of humanity as widely as possible.”

Josée Drouin-Brisebois is the Senior Curator of Contemporary Art responsible for the collections of Canadian and international Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada. She has been highly involved with the Canadian participation at the Venice Biennale for the last decade. She was curator of the Steven Shearer (2011) and Shary Boyle (2013) exhibitions and also served as project director for Geoffrey Farmer’s 2017 participation, and was the lead curator of Isuma’s exhibition for the 2019 Biennale edition. She has curated numerous monographic and thematic exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (MOCA) and The Rooms in Newfoundland and Labrador. Since 2016 she is the Jury Chair for the Sobey Art Award, the pre-eminent prize for contemporary Canadian art. In addition to publishing catalogues for the National Gallery and the Venice Biennale, her writing on contemporary art has appeared in a variety of publications and periodicals in Canada and abroad.

Project is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Kaunas City Municipality and is a part of the project “Kaunas – European Capital of Culture in 2022”.