Meet the Author
Ute Meta Bauer
Ute Meta Bauer (born 1958 in Stuttgart, Germany) is an educator and curator in the field of contemporary art. Since 2013, she has been the Founding Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and a Professor in the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University. She currently co-chairs the Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices and is the Principal Investigator for the three-year research project “Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss.” Bauer has held leadership positions in multiple cul- tural and academic institutions: as Artistic Director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart e.V. (1990–94); Professor of Theory, Practice, and Communication of Contem- porary Art and Vice Rector of International Affairs at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1996–2006); and Founding Director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (2002–05). At the Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology (MIT), Bauer served as Director of the Visual Art Program (2005–09), as the Founding Director of MIT’s program in Art, Culture, and Tech- nology (ACT) (2009–12), and at the Royal College of Art London she was Dean of the School of Fine Art (2012–2013). Bauer was a co-curator of Documenta11 (2002) on the team of artistic director Okwui Enwezor and served as artistic director for the 3rd Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2004). Together with Paul C. Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, she co-curated the US Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), featuring video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas, for which they received honorary mention for best national pavilion. Most recently she curated the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), presenting Shubigi Rao’s Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, and she was a curator of the 17th Istanbul Biennial alongside David Teh and Amar Kanwar (both in 2022). Bauer has published and co-edited numerous pub- lications in the field of contemporary art including: The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia) (World Sci- entific, 2020); Culture City. Culture Scape. (NTU Cen- tre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Mappletree Investments, 2021); Climates. Habitats. Environments. (MIT Press and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, 2022); the monograph Joan Jonas: Moving of the Land (Walther König, 2022); Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book (National Arts Council Singapore, 2023); Of Haunted Spaces: Cinema, Heter- otopias, and China’s Hyperurbanization on the films of Ella Raidel (NUS Press, 2023); and, co-edited with Dr. Karin Oen and Boon Hui Tan, SEA: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia (Weiss Publications, 2022).
