Alhena Katsof is a writer and organizer who works in close conversation with artists. Her practice encompasses visual art, performance art, creative non-fiction writing, 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 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, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz’s first solo exhibition and film commission in the US, which was organized with Mason Leaver-Yap at Walker Art Center, produced with Victoria Brooks at EMPAC, and exhibited at PARTICIPANT INC. and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
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 performance-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 has written about numerous artists including Polly Apfelbaum, Nicole Eisenman, and Gordon Hall. She has published interviews with the artist Laura Aldridge and curator Nana Adusei-Poku in BOMB Magazine and Performance Research respectively. Her short-form writing has been published in C Magazine, Canadian Art, KALEIDOSCOPE and MAP Magazine. With Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder, she edited (and contributed to) the monograph Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present (Dancing Foxes Press and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art), and she edited the monograph Brendan Fernandes: Inaction (Skira Press). Katsof is part of the editorial collective Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.
From 2011-2018 Katsof worked with Dana Yahalomi, Director of Public Movement. The performances she created with Yahalomi have been staged at venues including KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Santarcangelo Festival, and Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art. Katsof and Yahalomi co-authored the book Solution 263: Double Agent as part of the Solution Series edited by Ingo Neirmann (Sternberg Press).
Katsof has participated in curatorial residencies and workshops at Denniston Hill and Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. She was artist-in residence with Public Movement at IASPIS; Museum As Hub Fellow at the New Museum; and Volkswagen Fellow at MoMA PS1 where she worked with the design and research studio, Metahaven. Katsof was the primary research assistant for Elena Filipovic’s book-length study David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 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.
An experienced educator, Katsof has taught high-school, undergraduate, and graduate students in visual studies, performance studies, curatorial studies, and the fine arts. She has taught courses at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Sotheby’s Summer Institute. Katsof has been a mentor on the Low- Residency MFA at School of the Art Institute Chicago and a Guest Critic at numerous schools including Hunter College, School of Visual Arts, School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, and Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts. 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 since 2017.
Katsof was a participant on the de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. She received an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, and a Liberal Arts degree from Hampshire College. Katsof is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University.
For more please see: academia.edu