NORWICH, UK.-EAST maintains its impressive reputation for attracting artists of the highest international quality with the announcement that Dirk Snauwaert and Jeremy Deller have agreed to select EAST 2006.

Dirk Snauwaert studied art history at the University of Ghent in Belgium, and was curator of the Palais des Beaux Arts Brussels from 1989 to 1995. He organized the Wide White Space exhibition in 1993 which toured to the Kunstmuseum Bonn and MAC Marseille. As Director of the Kunstverein Munchen from 1996 to 2001 he organized exhibitions by David Lamelas and Andre Cadere. As co-director of the Institut d'Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne-Lyon, France, he organized exhibitions by Rita McBride, Peter Friedl, Oyvind Fahlström and Adrian Piper amongst others. He is the founding director of WIELS, a new centre of contemporary art in Brussels, due to open in December 2006. This is the first exhibition that he has been directly involved with in the UK.

Jeremy Deller studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and won the Turner Prize in 2004 but he was noticed years earlier in Norwich when he was selected for EASTinternational in 1995. His work involves collaboration with individuals and groups of people, and has shown at Tate Britain and the Barbican, as well as throughout Europe and America. His restaging of the Battle of Orgrave during the miner’s strike in 1980-1 was filmed by director Mike Figgis for Artangel Media and Channel 4, but it was his Acid Brass project of 1997, for which he hired Manchester’s famous Williams Fairey Brass Band to perform custom-arranged instrumental versions of various Acid House anthems, that really established him as an artist. He has also made work reflecting on Richard Hoggert’s Uses of Literacy and the Manic Street Preachers. Deller is the first exhibitor in EAST to go on to become a selector.

Lynda Morris, Curator of Norwich Gallery says “….with these selectors the next EAST will identify a new generation of artists from a truly international mix of British, European and American contexts. It will be the show of the year for new art.”

The selection of artists for EAST 2006 will take place in December 2005. This is earlier than in previous years because of plans for EAST to become a biennale event alongside CAN.07 Contemporary Art Norwich in 2007.