The Gwangju Biennale Foundation has appointed Massimiliano Gioni as artistic director of the 8th Gwangju Biennale, opening in 2010.

Massimiliano Gioni is the Artistic Director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan and Director of Special Exhibitions at the New Museum in New York. He is the youngest Artistic Director in the history of the Gwangju Biennale, and the first European to take on this position.

“The Gwangju Biennale Foundation is very pleased to work with Massimiliano Gioni as the artistic director of the 8th Gwangju Biennale. Gioni is one of the emerging curators remapping the international landscape of art in the 21st century. Both his institutional work at the Trussardi Foundation, and at the New Museum, as well as his re-invention of the genre of the large-scale exhibition were ground-breaking, challenging and exhilarating.”comments Yongwoo Lee, CEO of the Gwangju Biennale and Vice President of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation.

An accomplished curator and a writer, Gioni has collaborated with many institutions, museums, and biennials, while cultivating a series of independent initiatives such as the Wrong Gallery and the self-published magazines Charley and the Wrong Times. In 2006 he curated Of Mice and Men: the 4th Berlin Biennale with artist Maurizio Cattelan and curator Ali Subotnick.

In 2004 he curated Manifesta 5 (San Sebastian, Spain) with Marta Kuzma. He is a frequent collaborator with the Dakis Joannou Collection, having co-curated Monument to Now (Athens, 2004) and of The Fractured Figure (Athens, 2007).

In 2003 he was appointed Director of the Trussardi Foundation, a nomadic museum that has staged solo exhibitions, special projects and artistic interventions in abandoned buildings, public spaces and forgotten monuments throughout the city of Milan. Artists exhibited through his work with the Foundation have included Pawel Althamer, John Bock, Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Creed, Elmgreen and Dragset, Urs Fischer, Fischli and Weiss, Paola Pivi, Anri Sala, and Tino Sehgal.

As Director of Special Exhibitions for the New Museum, Gioni co-curated the inaugural exhibition in its new facility, Unmonumental, with Richard Flood and Laura Hoptman. He organized Paul Chan’s first institutional exhibition in America, and curated After Nature, a group exhibition that combined contemporary artists with outsiders, writers, and other cult figures. Most recently he co-curated “Younger Than Jesus”, an international survey of artists born around 1980.

“I am very much looking forward to this opportunity,”said Gioni on the occasion of his appointment. “The Gwangju Biennale is certainly one of the most respected biennials in the world, and one that has kept pushing its limits by working with great curators and directors, from Harald Szeemann to Okwui Enwezor. The fact that the biennale was founded to commemorate and honor the uprisings that led to the democratization of South Korea makes it a very unique institution that is rooted not only in contemporary art, but in culture at large.”