Alhena Katsof is a writer who works in close conversation with artists. Her practice encompasses performance art, visual art, exhibition making, and unorthodox modes of transdisciplinary scholarship.
While Katsof is a scholar of exhibition histories, her approach to curating has often been through the lens of the artist-as-curator and she works in service of the radical vulnerability that making art requires. Many of Katsof’s exhibitions and curatorial projects have been organized in spaces that emerged from the artist-led alternative space movement including White Columns, MoMA PS1, PARTICIPANT INC., Regina Rex, and A. Vermin — the artist-run gallery she organized in her Glasgow apartment for three years. Among the exhibitions and performances that Katsof has curated are Towards the Unknown, a traveling exhibition of drawings, scores, and graphic notations by the autophysiopsychic musician Yusef Lateef and Telepathic Improvisation, a performance-based moving-image work and exhibition by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz which was organized with Mason Leaver-Yap.
Katsof’s research about the artist Hannah Höch’s material output and her illicit activities during the Third Reich, which included growing plants prohibited by Nazi horticulturalists while simultaneously burying in her garden artworks banned by the fascist regime, has been presented as lectures. These lectures, which have taken place at Bridget Donahue, Rongwrong, and with the Center for Experimental Lectures, explore seeds as archives, the language of plants, autochthony, and the ideological distinction between humans and nature.
Katsof’s essays about fascism, colonialism, and gardens have been included in volumes such as On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation (Valiz) and Interior Garden (Hatje Cantz). This work is informed by queer theory and Black feminist scholarship. Her writing about exhibitions has been published in volumes including The Artist As Curator: An Anthology (Mousse Publishing); How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (MIT Press); and and As Radical, As Mother, As Salad, As Shelter: What Should Art Institutions Do Now? (Paper Monument).
Katsof’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogues, anthologies, art magazines, and peer-review academic journals. She has written about numerous artists including Polly Apfelbaum, Nicole Eisenman, and Gordon Hall, and has conducted interviews with artists and curators including Nana Adusei-Poku, Laura Aldridge, and Nina Canell. Together with Dana Yahalomi, Katsof co-authored the book Solution 263: Double Agent as part of the Solution Series edited by Ingo Neirmann (Sternberg Press). Katsof’s editorial projects include Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present (Dancing Foxes Press and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art), and Brendan Fernandes: Inaction (Skira Press). Katsof is a member of the editorial collective for Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.
Katsof has participated in training and fellowships at De Appel Arts Center in Amsterdam; the New Museum in New York City; and MoMA PS1 in Queens, as well as curatorial residencies and workshops at Denniston Hill and Banff Center for Arts and Creativity.
Katsof was the primary research assistant for Elena Filipovic’s book-length study David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale (One Work Series, Afterall); and part of the research team for the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base, a project of the Artist Archives Initiative hosted by Fales Library at New York University.
Katsof has two decades of experience as an educator working with high-school, undergraduate, and graduate students in performance studies, visual studies, curatorial studies, and fine arts — often in the Liberal Arts context. She has taught courses at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; New York University; and Sotheby’s Summer Institute. She is currently Part-Time Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies Department at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School where she has been teaching and contributing to curriculum development since 2017.
Katsof received a Liberal Arts degree from Hampshire College, an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, and is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University.
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