Ameli M. Klein is a curator, writer, and researcher exploring how culture produces, distorts, and negotiates belief. Her work traces the hauntology of cultural forms: images, objects, and practices travel through time and context, carrying sedimented meanings and layered ideologies. She investigates how aesthetic and institutional codes confer authority, shape perception, and circulate power, revealing art as both instrument and site of knowledge, persuasion, and imagination. Cultural forms hold simultaneous truths and fictions, material and ephemeral, inviting both empathy and critique.
What mechanisms allow culture to propagate political, religious, or social ideologies? How can we trace the circulation of authority while attending to its fragility and ambiguity? How might we confront our own positionalities to critically engage with narratives and the illusion of binary truth?
Image Credit: Michael Varelmann
Ameli M. Klein is the director of Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, where she recently concluded the five-part, nomadic exhibition cycle Genius Loci: Notes on Places- realized across Ludwigshafen, Speyer, Bad Kreuznach, Neustadt an der Weinstraße, and Mainz. Drawing on the writings of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856–1935), the project positioned place as a site where affect, memory, and ideology sediment over time—where historical forces persist, reappear, and continue to structure perception.
Conceived as an exhibition embedded in lived environments, Genius Loci asked: When does aesthetic experience sharpen critical awareness, and when does it anesthetize? How do cultural narratives inscribe themselves into bodies, images, and spaces, and how might these sedimented structures be read against their own historical grain? Works by Ruth Beraha, Maeve Brennan, Zuzanna Czebatul, Kevin Jerome Everson, Hélène Fauquet, Enej Gala, Andrea Geyer, Itamar Gov, Gabriella Hirst, Gideon Horváth, Sophie Jung, Aziza Kadyri, Kalos&Klio, Marcos Kueh, Theresa Lawrenz, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Germain Marguillard, Omar Mismar, Brittany Nelson, Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia, Panos Profitis, Paola Siri Renard, Ilê Sartuzi, and Alexis Stiteler formed a polyphonic inquiry into how places remember, how they are instrumentalized, and how they might be re-read, interrupted, or reimagined.
The forthcoming publication extends this inquiry with contributions by Emily S. K. Anderson, Valentina Bay, Sladja Blažan, Sally Blackburn Daniels, Barbara Clausen, Christopher Londa, Erin Dziedzic, Vicente Flores Militello, Andrea Geyer, Jennifer Higgie, Sophie Jung, Dylan Kenny, Peter Murphy, Daniel Orrells, Cassie Packard, Eugenio Refini, Patrick Schollmeyer, Gregory Sholette, Lukas Spielhofer, Lorenz Winkler-Horaček, Colton Valentine, and Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju.
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. Klein was an EPIC Fellow at the AAMC Engagement Program for International Curators with Terra Foundation and Art Fund_ (2021) and was a participant in the Anthropocene Campus Venice at the invitation of 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). Klein 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.
Selected 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.
Recent publications include “How Many Voices Does It Take to Form a Choir? Jasmina Cibic’s Anti-Systemic World-Making” (Camera Austria, September 2024), “Die Klimafrage lässt sich nur gemeinsam mit der sozialen Fragen lösen: Gespräch mit Oliver Ressler” in Fokus Klima (BMKÖS, September 2024), and “Property Will Cost Us the Earth” for Oliver Ressler: Barricading the Ice Sheets (Buchhandlung Franz und Walther König, 2023), the catalog that accompanied his solo exhibition series at Camera Austria, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, n.b.k. – Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Tallinn Art Hall, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, and The Showroom, London.