Mumbai-born curator and writer Zasha Colah has been chosen to curate the Thirteenth Berlin Biennale, scheduled to take place in the summer of 2025. Colah earlier this year was named co-artistic director, with Francesca Verga of Ar/ Ge kunst Bolzano in northern Italy Province of South Tyrol.
Raised in Zambia and India, Colah served as curator of modern Indian art at the JNAF/CSMVS Museum and curator of public programs at National Gallery of Modern Art, both in Mumbai. In 2010, she co-founded the Mumbai-based Clark House Initiative alongside Yogesh Barve, Sachin Bonde, Poonam Jain, Prabhakar Pachpute, Amol K Patil, Rupali Patil, Nikhil Raunak and Sumesh Sharma. The collaborative effort between curators and artists, which concluded in 2022, centered on issues of freedom and drew inspiration from organizations such as the Black Panther Party and Fluxus Group, as well as artists such as AA Raiba, Joseph Beuys, Frantz Fanon, and Nil Yalter, and political reformers BR Ambedkar and Cheikh Anta Diop.
In 2014, Colah began dividing his time between Mumbai and Berlin. In 2016, she curated the “body baggage” exhibition at Graz, Austria's steirischer herbst festival. The following year, she served as co-curator, with Luca Cerizza, of India's Third Pune Biennale, “Habit-co-Habit. Artistic simulations of some everyday spaces in India.” Since 2017, he has lived in Turin, Italy, during which time he was part of the curatorial team for the Second China Yinchuan Biennial, “Starting from the Desert. Ecology on the Edge”, in 2018. That same year, she took on the position of professor of curatorial studies at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, in Milan, where she still teaches. In 2020, he completed his PhD at Sapienza – Università di Roma; her thesis explored illegality and meta-exhibition practices in Indo-Myanmar from the 1980s onwards. Also in 2020, she joined the Archive, a decentralized community of practice with members in Berlin, Dakar and Milan, under whose auspices she is a co-curator of exhibitions.
Source: Artforum