Curatorial Approach

Curating, for me, is a form of storytelling, one rooted in context, collaboration, and critical dialog. Each project is a conversation among artworks, artists, audiences, and the institutional/ geographic/ historic frameworks in which they meet. My curatorial approach also emphasizes place-making: from activating heritage architecture to shaping encounters in exhibition spaces that resonate across borders.

Throughout my nearly two decades of work between regions, I have sought to foster artistic connections and transnational exchanges. I am committed to challenging inherited frameworks and shifting away from Western-centric narratives, as well as creating platforms where a plurality of voices can surface. Whether working with emerging or established artists and institutions, my aim is to build projects that hold space for complexity, forge unexpected affinities, and reimagine how culture circulates today.

In 2025, SOAS University of London invited me to lecture on the foundations of curating for its MA in Museum Studies in Saudi Arabia, at Effat University in Jeddah and IAU in Dammam.

Selected Curatorial Projects (contact me for full CV)

Currently, as Senior Curator at Helvetika 1575 in Zug, I shape an exhibition program that opens its next chapter with FRAGILE: The Choreography of Care (November 2026) and has included Surface Tension with Michèle Buhofer and Marya Kazoun; Lumière Liquide with Tony Cragg and Erwin Wurm in Saint-Tropez; The Shape of Seeing, pairing Pablo Picasso and Zheng Chongbin; After Attention with Marina Abramović and Márta Kucsora; and the solo exhibition Hermann Nitsch: The Art of Extremes. I brought the gallery to its first art fairs, ENTER Art Fair Copenhagen, Art Salon Zurich and London Art Fair, and I lead its provenance research, including a Picasso work certified by the Picasso committee in Paris.

Previously, as Curatorial Director of Hafez Gallery, I paired curatorial vision with market strategy by conceiving modern and contemporary presentations in Jeddah and Riyadh and at Art Dubai, Menart Fair, Abu Dhabi Art, L’Art Pur, Eye of the Collector, and Sotheby’s London. I placed art history-defining artworks in private and public collections, such as Hakim Al-Akel’s Dialogue in the Market (1991) at Barjeel Art Foundation. Other highlights were an expansive group exhibition to inaugurate the gallery’s new branch in Jax/Riyadh and a solo exhibition in collaboration with the Diriyah Biennale. In Saudi Arabia I also co-produced Of Myrrh and Silver (a performative walk) and Living in Colour (art guide training and a walking tour) in AlUla, together with Wizara for AlUla Arts and the Royal Commission for AlUla.

Earlier, in Amsterdam, I co-conceived Bourgeois Leftovers, embedding new commissions amid seventeenth-century genre paintings from the Van Abbemuseum to question what histories collecting institutions choose to forge and preserve. In Bahrain, the three-week public arts festival Alwan338 // Foundations turned an entire district into a laboratory for 27 new site-specific works, while the exhibition Modern Miracles traveled between a fifteenth-century monument in Cairo and a bastion of Hellenistic history in Alexandria to explore photography’s role in shaping collective memory. Two Truths and a Lie followed at the Institut Français d’Égypte in Cairo and Alexandria.

My projects often migrate: Notes for Tomorrow, co-curated with ICI, has been re-imagined at eighteen venues from Istanbul’s Pera Museum to the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and Occupational Hazards, selected from more than 500 proposals for apexart’s NYC Open Call, transferred conversations about the circulation of artworks in and out of the Middle East to Downtown New York City. Another proposal of mine won apexart’s International Open Call, resulting in Staging the Body in Contemporary Arab Art, a group show in Cairo co-curated with Adham Hafez, which is postponed until further notice. Other recent projects include Amina Yahia’s first solo exhibition, They Call Me Divine, at Hunna هُنَّ in Kuwait, and the group show See You Online at Contemporary Image Collective / CiC Cairo, both as curator by invitation. These geographically varied, often collaborative initiatives reflect my commitment to threading local narratives into an international dialog.

Education

My academic path moves between art theory, curating, cultural economics, and diplomacy, disciplines that together shape how I negotiate the global art ecosystem. I began with a BA in Fine Arts and Art & Media Theory at the Zurich University of the Arts, then refined my curatorial practice at De Appel’s Curatorial Program in Amsterdam. Two advanced degrees at Erasmus University Rotterdam (an MA in Arts & Culture Studies and a P-MA in Cultural Economics) deepened my grasp of how ideas circulate through markets and institutions. Most recently, a postgraduate diploma in Global Diplomacy and Cultural Policy at SOAS, University of London, has sharpened my ability to translate artistic vision into cross-regional partnerships.