FRIBOURG.- The board of the Association Fri-Art and the entire team are delighted to announce that Kathrin Bentele has been appointed new artistic director of Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg, starting in October 2025.

The board emphasizes Kathrin Bentele’s distinct curatorial practice, which she has developed over the past four years as director of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, testifying to a profound understanding of the institution as a site of production, mediation, collective exchange and dialogue. The board has particularly appreciated her overall curatorial concept for the Kunsthalle Friart, which develops across various artistic formats and fosters a dialogue between international and Swiss artists, as well as artists and cultural workers from Fribourg.

“Since its foundation, the Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg has been distinguished by an experimental and independent exhibition making practice – developed in close dialogue with artists –, as well as by an expanded understanding of the contemporary, in which the historical and the peripheries and margins of the present are also reflected upon. I look forward to further developing this exceptional institutional culture and identity. My program is based on various artistic formats and comprehends the institution in an integral sense, in which exhibition production, discourse and a communal attitude intertwine.” -- Kathrin Bentele

Kathrin Bentele will direct the Kunsthalle together with Estelle Negro, who has been administrative director since 2021.

Kathrin Bentele (1986, St. Gallen, CH) has been Director of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf since 2021. Previously, she worked at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, at Artists Space in New York, at Kunsthaus Glarus and at the art book publisher JRP|Ringier in Zurich, among others. Kathrin Bentele has lectured and taught at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Cologne University, Art Academy Düsseldorf, Art Academy Münster, and Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She studied art history and cultural analysis at the University of Zurich. At the Kunstverein, she has realized institutional solo exhibitions by Wang Bing, Monica Majoli, Behrang Karimi, Fiona Connor, Jessica Vaughn, Matthias Groebel, Angharad Williams, Yuki Kimura, as well as thematic group exhibitions such as A Portrait in Fragments, Calling, and CLOSER, which explored in various ways the communicative, performative, and narrative potential of artworks.