HELSINKI.- Amos Rex announced the appointment of Irene Campolmi and Khanyisile Mbongwa as new curators, marking an expansion of the museum’s curatorial vision and international networks.
Curators Irene Campolmi and Khanyisile Mbongwa join Amos Rex at a pivotal moment as the museum begins a new curatorial direction focussing on two strategic priorities: art at the intersection of technology and society; and art in the public realm. The new curators bring with them extensive artistic and intellectual networks, deep expertise in their fields, and an international outlook that moves beyond the traditional boundaries of contemporary art and the lens of the Global North.
Irene Campolmi - Curator for Art, Technology and Society - is an Italian-Danish curator, art historian, and researcher whose practice is rooted in decolonial thinking and interdisciplinary inquiry across art, science, technology, and performance.
”As our societies grow increasingly dependent on technology, it is vital to critically examine its social, political, and ethical impact. Art plays a key public role in fostering reflection and imagining more equitable technological futures. I am thrilled to join Amos Rex in this new curatorial role and to strengthen its programming, international networks, and research-driven initiatives.”
Irene Campolmi has a strong track record of building strategic interdisciplinary networks and examining humanity’s evolving relationship with technology; her recent work includes Yet it moves—a major survey at Copenhagen Contemporary in collaboration with Arts at CERN exploring motion as an omnipresent phenomenon—and is the co-founder of Yonder Art•ScienceNiels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Prior to joining Amos Rex, Campolmi served as Senior Curator at MAPS – Museum of Art in Public Spaces (2023–2026) and as Head of the Art Program at Enter Art Fair (2019–2023) in Denmark.
With more than fifteen years of experience, Campolmi has curated the Estonian Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, and exhibitions at TANK Museum, Shanghai; MAAT in Lisbon; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; The Power Plant in Toronto; Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg; Musée d'art de Joliette and l'UQAM Galleries in Montreal, and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. Campolmi is a faculty member of the Master for Curatorial Studies at IED - Institute of European Design, Florence and is concluding her PhD at Aarhus University.
Khanyisile Mbongwa – Curator of Art in the Public Realm - is a curatorial theorist, sociologist, and Sangoma (ancestral-indigenous healer) formerly based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her practice operates at the intersection of contemporary art, ancestral knowledge, and emancipatory imaginaries, approaching curating not only as exhibition-making but as an ethical, political, and spiritual practice.
“I curate as a way of imagining and dreaming the world—grappling with the realities I inhabit while reaching toward what might be. For me, exhibition-making is a rehearsal space for the futures we long to enact in the everyday. I remain curious, even unsettled, about whether curating—historically an extractive practice and an institutional legacy of coloniality—can be reconfigured and mobilized otherwise.”
Khanyisile Mbongwa has extensive experience with public art commissions and working with community, indigeneity and publicness; her curatorship of the 12th Liverpool Biennial (2023), which addressed healing from the traumas of slavery and colonialism, exemplifies her ability to engage with complex, shared subject matter and diverse publics. Her research engages with the human condition, Black Radical Traditions, Trans-Indigeneity, BIPOC-queer aesthetics, and ways of imagining alternative futures through black lived experiences and ancestral knowledges (Black-Indigenous). She is the founding curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale and served as Chief Curator for its 2020 and 2025 editions. Across both editions, she has articulated a curatorial framework in which art, knowledge, and lived experience operate as co-constitutive forces shaping equity, memory, and shared imaginative futures.
Mbongwa has engaged with Asiko Art School, Independent Curators International, and Harvard University-Africa Centre, interrogating curatorial practice as an inherited colonial framework and exploring its potential for critical reorientation and transformation. She has led major international projects including uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things (Liverpool Biennial, 2023), History’s Footnote: On Love & Freedom (Marres, 2021), and iiNyanka Zonyaka (Norval Foundation, 2020).
