Mit Kunstwerken handeln

Ruth Noack, an art historian, writer, teacher and exhibition maker, is best known to the global art world as curator of documenta 12. Between 2019 and 2022, she acted as Executive Director and Curator of The Corner at Whitman-Walker in Washington, D.C. Her exhibitions at The Corner included The Mental Body, on aesthetic acts of self-creation and self-care, Stay Alive to Life, on resilience in times of COVID, See You There, on making history at Whitman-Walker and, When We First Arrived..., an exhibition with DYKWTCA.com, which amplified testimonies of children detained at the US-Mexico border through the works of 123 visual artists. Amongst Noack’s other recent exhibitions are the cycle begun in Trieste in 2023 on Eccentric Peripheries, and the cycle Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life, shown in Athens, Prague, Beijing and at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2019/20).

From 1994 onwards, she curated numerous exhibitions, amongst them Things We Don’t Understand at Generali Foundation, Vienna and a cycle on Foucault’s concept of governmentality in Vienna, Miami and Rotterdam (with R.M.Buergel). Serving as Head of Curating Contemporary Art at The Royal College in London (2012/2013), Noack has taught at universities and academies for more than 20 years, including 4 years at the Dutch Art Institute and guest professorships at AVU, Prague and Städelschule, Frankfurt and a deputy professorship at Bauhaus Universität Weimar. She has lectured internationally and authored more than 50 essays on art and on theory. In 2013, Noack published a monograph on Sanja Iveković and edited Agency, Ambivalence, Analysis. Approaching the Museum with Migration in Mind. In 2002/3, she served as President of the Austrian AICA.