FRANKFURT.- The Städelschule welcomed Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts as new curatorial duo for Portikus. They will start their position on February 1, 2022, succeeding curator Christina Lehnert.

Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts’s curatorial approach is based on concepts of collectivity and collaboration. Having both founded city-based projects, they aim to create bridges and networks between the global and the local. Their program will emphasize artistic practices that rethink the notion of exhibition making as well as seek regional and international collaborations. Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts are interested in amplifying Portikus as a platform not only for exhibitions but also for publishing and different forms of gatherings.

Liberty Adrien is a curator, art historian and critic. She founded the independent art space Âme Nue in Hamburg, dedicated to contemporary art and culture, and the artist studios Âme Nue Ateliers in Paris. The French Ministry of Culture awarded her a research grant for her study on "the history of works by women artists acquired for the French national collections, from 1791 to the present day". Since then, she has collaborated with the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) and the Institut français Paris to present exhibitions of video works from the French collections in several European cities. In 2021, Liberty Adrien curated the art space Les Vitrines at the Institut français Berlin.

Carina Bukuts is an editor, writer, and curator. She studied art history and philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Since 2018 she’s been working at frieze magazine, where she is associate editor. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of PASSE-AVANT, an online magazine for contemporary art and discourse. Carina Bukuts was a guest lecturer at Kunsthochschule Mainz, supervised the exhibition project Studiengalerie 1.357 at Goethe University and curated shows at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; CCA Tel-Aviv; Frankfurt Airport, among others. Her writings have appeared in several magazines and artists monographs, and she is a member of AICA Deutschland.

In 2021, Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts curated the large-scale project Balade Berlin, an exhibition route in public places, for which they worked with artists Haris Epaminonda, Christine Sun Kim, Jumana Manna, Ulrike Ottinger, Bettina Pousttchi, Willem de Rooij, Jimmy Robert, and Slavs and Tatars.

The Frankfurt-based Städelschule is the only art school in Germany with a Kunsthalle. Founded in 1987, Portikus is widely known as an important center for exhibiting contemporary art. It is a platform for both the presentation of emerging artists, showing in Germany for the first time, as well as renown artists working on site-specific commissions. As one of the few art spaces free of admission, Portikus has a unique role and responsibility in creating a communal space in the city of Frankfurt.