The Italy-based American curator and author Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has been elected Artistic Director of documenta 13, which will take June 9 through September 16, 2012. Bernd Leifeld, CEO of documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH announced the news after the unanimous decision had been made.

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American curator and author Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev will be the Artistic Director of Documenta 13.

(© Ryszard Kasiewicz; Courtesy of Documenta)

Christov-Bakargiev, who will be the first American to serve as Artistic Director of documenta, works as a curator and writer in Rome, Turin, and New York. She has served as Chief Curator of the Castellodi Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin since 2002 and was the Artistic Director of the Biennale of Sydney earlier this year. From 1999 to 2001 she was Senior Curator of Exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art. Previously, she organized exhibitions as an independent curator in a number of different countries. She has also written extensively on Arte Povera, the Italian avant-garde movement that emerged in the 1960s, and authored mongraphs on artists William Kentridge, Janet Cardiff, and Pierre Huyghe.

After years of artistic suppression under the Nazi Regime, artist and art educator Arnold Bode initiated the first documenta exhibition in 1955 to reconnect German public life with modern art. This exhibition has since become one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art worldwide, and it is still held every five years in Kassel, Germany.

The 12th edition of documenta, which took place from June 16 through September 23, 2007, featured work by 109 artists from 43 countries and was visited by more than 750,000 people. The Artistic Director from the 2007 edition, Roger Martin Buergel, who hails from Berlin, received much credit for the exhibition’s emphasis on the aesthetic experience and its focus on innovative education programs. He now serves as Chief Curator of the Miami Art Museum in Florida.

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