About
I am Kim Knoppers, and my work as an independent curator, writer and lecturer is rooted in art history. After many years in Amsterdam, I recently moved to Almen, a small village in the Achterhoek. The name literally means ‘back corner’. It is a tucked-away kind of place, and yet nothing here is closed off. My work, in any case, carries me much further afield.
After many years working primarily with photography and contemporary art, my interests have gradually shifted towards cultural history, archaeology, landscape and material culture. I keep returning to the ways people have lived alongside the land: how seasons have shaped everyday life, how the textures and phenomena of the natural world settle into the objects people made, into ritual and folklore. Artefacts, works of art and photographic archives offer me different ways of tracing these histories. This is increasingly where my different projects come together, with art and photography still very much part of my practice.
From 2011 to 2021 I was senior curator at Foam, photography museum Amsterdam, where I curated more than seventy exhibitions. Recent exhibitions include Living Mesh: A World Beyond Linnaeus at Verwey Museum Haarlem and The Lost Bazaar of Shkodër: Reviving a Memory at the Marubi National Museum of Photography in Albania and the Makryammos Ephemeral Art Residency on Thasos, Greece. My approach is transhistorical and associative. I set objects, artworks and images from different periods and disciplines side by side, until they begin to speak to one another, rather than lining them up along a single chronology or field.
I also write, because the act of it helps me see things more clearly. It is a way of following my curiosity wherever it leads, in an essayistic, associative voice. Over the years I have contributed to numerous exhibition cahiers, catalogues and artist books, and to magazines such as Foam Magazine, Camera Austria, Unseen Magazine and Aperture Magazine.
Teaching runs alongside this: at ECAL in Lausanne, where I built Do Not Disturb: Curating in Progress for the MA Photography, and at the International Center of Photography in New York, where I developed Surface Tension: The Material Life of Images.
Alongside my work, I am pursuing a master’s in Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the International Hellenic University in Thessaloniki. I lived for five years in Selçuk, near ancient Ephesus and the Aegean Sea, and that region still pulls at me. For now, though, I am learning the shape of a very different landscape: the bocage of Almen, its meadows framed by hedgerows and stands of trees.
Thanks
Hans Gremmen, design
Haicu webdesign, website development
Disclaimer
Despite the utmost care taken to ensure the correctness and completeness of my website, there is always the possibility that certain information is outdated or no longer correct over time. I can therefore in no way be held liable for the correctness of the information on this website. No rights can be derived from its contents. The information provided may be changed or improved by me at any time without further notice.
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