Ameli M. Klein is the director of the Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany. She is a multidisciplinary cultural worker engaged in curatorial, artistic, and writing practices. Her current research interrogates the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment and its various manifestations on the collecting, display, and research practice of Western museums. She is particularly interested in the effort to categorize, chart, and classify local and foreign cultures in the 19th and 20th centuries to create a pseudo-scientific methodology, prone to racial convictions.
Tracing these ideologies in current identity politics she examines how enlightenment museology and the belief that the appreciation of art shapes the moral and ethical character of the viewer bleeds into contemporary curatorial practices - hoping to unpack how the appropriation of art can be used to propagandize political, religious, or cultural ideologies up to the present day.
Building on this theoretical framework, her curatorial practice is strongly informed by contemporary artists who grapple with identity politics, the concepts of ‘East‘ and ‘West‘, the “Global South”, and Euro-centrality.
Ameli M. Klein has been a visiting Lecturer at the IZK Institute for Contemporary Art at the TU Graz, and at the Roaming Academy of the Dutch Art Institute, besides having been a visiting critic at the Design Department of the Royal Academy London. She has been an EPIC Fellow at the AAMC Engagement Program for International Curators with Terra Foundation and Art Fund_ (2021) and has been invited to participate in the Anthropocene Campus Venice by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the HKW (2021), and in Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities at Frame Finland in Helsinki (2022). She previously was a Curator in Residence at the SCL, Shanghai Biennial (2019), the V-A-C Curatorial Lab Venice (2019/20), and artpace San Antonio (2020).
Ameli has curated exhibitions and discursive programming at e-flux screening room NY, New York, the Magazzino Gallery of Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, the Stellwerk, Kassel, the Interference Archive New York, the ACFNY New York, Venice Independent Art Space, Venice, V-A-C Zattere, Venice, and Drugo More in Rijeka, besides others.
She holds a BA in Art History, Theatre- and American Studies from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Subsequently pursuing graduate work, she received VDAC and BCGS fellowships to the History of Art Departments of Dartmouth College (2016/17) and Cornell University (2018/19) and participated in PRINCIPLES OF CULTURAL DYNAMICS (2018) at the Global Humanities Campus (Johns Hopkins University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Harvard University, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Freie Universität Berlin).
Recent speaking engagements include “Kunst und Aktivismus in der Klimakrise: Zwischen der Bewegung und dem Museum” (2023) for ICOM at MQ Vienna, “Veni Etiam - Returning to the Biennale?” (2022) at the Department of Art History and Theory, University of Art and Design in Linz, “On Mediation” (2022) at Stellwerk, Kassel “Growing Resistance” (2022) at AA Summer School, London “Rewilding the Museum” (2022) at Arken Museum Copenhagen and the School of Visual Arts of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen “Curating the Archive? Strategies on the Intersection of Remembrance and Critical Engagement” (2022) at Camera Austria and the University of Graz, “Art Activism” (2022) at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin “The Automated Condition” (2022) at Princeton University and the University of Graz, Princeton NJ, “(Art) Tourism as Spectatorship” (2022) at The Association of Art Museum Curators, NYC, “Rethinking Tourism Towards New Paradigms of Repair” (2022) at Filodrammatica with Drugo More, Rijeka, “Art Exhibitions and Ecological Thinking” (2021) at Aarhus University, Aarhus, and “Cultural Mass Tourism and its Historical Context” (2021) at “An Archipelago of Connectivity: Port-Cities, Hinterlands, and Islands in the Modern Mediterranean“ DFG Research Network at Università Ca‘Foscari; Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venedig, Venice.
Image credit: C.L.