Amira Gad


Amira Gad is an art curator, writer, and editor in modern and contemporary art and architecture.

Career

From 2009 to 2014, Gad was Managing Curator and Publications at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. In her time at the institution, she curated exhibitions and public programmes including the show ‘Short Big Drama’ with artist Angela Bulloch, ‘The Temptation of AA Bronson’ that received the AICA Best Exhibition of the Year Award in The Netherlands and the 2-day conference I AM FOR AN ART CRITICISM THAT… held at Witte de With Center for Center for Contemporary Art and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam curated with the-then artistic director Defne Ayas.
Gad worked as a curator at the Serpentine Galleries in London from 2014 to 2019 where her exhibitions were widely covered by the international press. She curated exhibitions of work by artists Arthur Jafa and Jimmie Durham both of whom were awarded the prestigious Golden Lion Award at the 2019 Venice Biennale of Art. And her show of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's work ‘Verses After Dusk’ awarded the artist the Sky Arts Award for Visual Arts in 2016.
Her exhibition of Arthur Jafa's work ‘A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions’ traveled from London's Serpentine Galleries to the Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin where it won the AICA Award for Best Exhibition of 2018 in Germany, continued its tour to Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The accompanying catalogue won the Richard Schlagman Art Book Award in 2019.
Sondra Perry's 2018 Serpentine Galleries exhibition ‘Typhoon Coming On’ traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami while the Torbjørn Rødland exhibition ‘The Touch That Made You’ she curated in 2017 toured to the Fondazione Prada Osservatorio in Milan.
In 2016, the exhibition of Zaha Hadid's early paintings and drawings first presented at the Serpentine Galleries was then presented at ArtisTree in Hong Kong and Simon Denny's 2015 show for the Serpentine was restaged as a group exhibition, co-curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist, and presented at the K11 Art Foundation in both Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Alongside working on exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, Gad was the curator working on the public commission by Lee Ufan installed in Kensington Gardens in 2018, as well as part of the selection committee that appointed Japanese architect Junya Ishigami for the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion and the curator on Serpentine 2016 architecture programme that presented Bjarke Ingels Group, Asif Khan, Kunlé Adeyemi, Yona Friedman, and Barkow Leibinger.
She served on the selection committee for Serpentine Galleries's Augmented Architecture programme that launched in 2019 and nominated a project by artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen which was realised in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and Sir David Adjaye.

Selected exhibitions

In 2018, Gad was nominated to a panel of 10 women that selected artists shown at Frieze Art Fair London's special section ‘Social Work’ dedicated to women whose work emerged in response to the global social and political schisms of the 1980s and ’90s. That same year, she was also nominated as a woman leader of the art world by The Sunday Times. Gad also sat on judging panels and committees for the Prix de Rome, Aesthetica Art Prize, First Book Award, Neo:Art Prize.
She is a regular contributor to artists’ catalogues, has edited a number of books on contemporary art, and was a commissioning editor for Ibraaz, an online platform dedicated to visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa.
Gad is a regular guest lecturer at Sotheby's Institute of Art in London and other art schools in addition to giving talks, leading masterclasses and workshops such as Frieze Academy's day-long event ‘How to Curate an Exhibition’.

Awards and honours