The Design Biennial announces new curator

ISTANBUL

Deniz Ova (L) Istanbul Design Biennial director and Zoe Ryan curator of the Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago will work together in the second Design Biennial of Istanbul.

Britain’s Zoë Ryan, curator of the Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, has been appointed as the curator of the second Istanbul Design Biennial, to be held from Oct. 18 to Dec. 14, 2014, according to the event organizer, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV).

Since joining the museum in 2006, curator and writer Ryan has been building the museum’s first collection of contemporary design in addition to expanding its holdings in historical and contemporary architecture. In addition to her work at the museum, she is an adjunct assistant professor in the Art History Department at the School of the Art Institute and at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she teaches a masters-level seminar focused on critical issues in design.

Prior to working at the museum, Ryan was senior curator at the Van Alen Institute in New York, a non-profit public art and architecture organization committed to improving the design of the public realm. In addition to editing the Van Alen Report, the institute’s quarterly journal, she organized a variety of exhibitions including “The Good Life: New Public Spaces for Recreation.”

About Zoe Ryan

Ryan has also held curatorial assistant positions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Ryan is often called upon as a juror and critic and has lectured on her work internationally. She has served on the advisory committee of the Experimenta Design Biennial in Lisbon and was part of the curatorial advisory committee for Spontaneous Interventions in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012. She served as chair of the jury for the National Design Awards, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York in 2013; during that same year, she was also part of the jury for the Wheelwright Fellowship, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to her work, Ryan’s recent exhibitions include “Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects” (2012), the first survey exhibition of this Chicago-based architecture practice; “Fashioning the Object: Bless, Boudicca, and Sandra Backlund” (2012), which investigates the construction of narratives in fashion design; “Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention” (2011), a major retrospective of this iconic Chicago architect; “Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design,” (2010), an international survey exploring inter-disciplinary practices in architecture and design; “Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design” (2009), the first solo exhibition of the work of the German industrial designer, and “Graphic Thought Facility: Resourceful Design” (2008), the first solo show of the work of the eponymous London-based studio. In fall 2012, Fast Company magazine named Ryan one of the 50 people shaping the future of design.

About the Istanbul Design Biennial

The Second Istanbul Design Biennial will be realized under the co-sponsorship of Vestel and VitrA, while Ryan will announce a conceptual framework for event at a press conference in November 2013.

The biennial’s advisory board members include the chairman of the board of the VitrA Design Foundation, Alexander von Vegesack; architect Han Tümertekin; architect, editor, writer Joseph Grima, who was also the curator of the first Istanbul Design Biennial; industrial designer and director of the first Istanbul Design Biennial, Özlem Yalım Özkaraoğlu; UltraRPM Chairman Paul McMillan; Yaşar University Vice Rector Tevfik Balcıoğlu, who is also a board member and design coordinator of the İzmir Mediterranean Academy, as well as graphic designer Yeşim Demir.