Christina Werner

Christina Werner is the managing director of the Institut für Raumexperimente e.V.. She has been co-directing the Institut für Raumexperimente as part of the Berlin University of the Arts since its inception in 2009. Co-directing involved teaching, curating, moderating, critiquing, and administrating. Her work at the Institut für Raumexperimente emphasized not only an interest in building programmatic links between art and other disciplines but a comprehensive approach to curating the institute’s wide-ranging program of artistic practice and research; workshops, exhibitions and publications; food-related formats; perception experiments; contemplative exercises; field trips; institutional collaborations and collaborative initiatives; as well as an unobtrusive guidance in choreographing and facilitating an open environment for communication and art and knowledge production. By cultivating engagement among divergent fields of theory and practice, the program created an atmosphere of experimentation that challenged the norms by which we learn how to learn and, consequently, unfolded its curriculum in retrospect.

Christina Werner earned a degree in Cultural Studies at the Universities of Hildesheim and Tübingen and completed a postgraduate program in Critical Studies at the Lund University/Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. During 2007–09, she was curator for visual arts at the Cultural Committee of German Industries, and its artist award and exhibition series ‘ars viva’. Previously, she was director of the gallery Wohnmaschine, Berlin, was involved in opening a project space in Chinatown, Los Angeles, and co-curated various exhibition projects at the nGbK, Berlin. She has served as assistant to Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of Documenta11, Kassel, in 2002, worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2000-2001, freelanced at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin and realized projects with ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She is co-initiator of the project Acting Archives – Media Lab for Artistic Research and Education, developing collaborative art and education formats between Ethiopian, German and international artists and theorists on the subject of artistic translation, research and proactive archiving, funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.