Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg (NL), curator and initiator working from Europe and the US, is currently the artistic director at Jester in Genk, Belgium. Jester is a small organisation with big ambitions, working with (inter)national artists and partners on outspoken projects.
Gouwenberg brings to the table a fresh perspective, underpinned by a substantial international network and experience. Recently she was the co-curator for melanie bonajo’s presentation for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022.
After running multidisciplinary exhibition space Expodium in Utrecht, Gouwenberg participated in the renowned de Appel Curatorial Program (2006-07) and worked at the research and production platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (2007-11). During the directorship of Defne Ayas at Kunstinstituut Melly, she was involved in major projects by Alexandre Singh, Michael Portnoy, and Rana Hamadeh. In 2010, together with artist Keren Cytter and curator Kathy Noble, Gouwenberg initiated A.P.E. (art projects era), which focused on the development of projects that cannot be realised within traditional institutional formats or frameworks. Between 2012 and 2022 she was part of the short and mid-length committee at International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2014, she founded the multidisciplinary residency program Deltaworkers in New Orleans together with Joris Lindhout, and in 2017, Gouwenberg joined the Performa team in New York as producer at large.
Orlando Maaike started the position of artistic director at Jester in a particularly complex, fragile, and challenging context, and also one that requires new perspectives and experimental strategies.
She loves it and with her small team she's ready for the indeterminate future. “It is an unprecedented time that calls for outspoken choices,” she says. “We are at the tail end of the pandemic that has held up a mirror to the fast-paced, overcrowded capitalist world and forced the individual, on the one hand, to revert to small, local, sometimes lonely, physical ways of living, and on the other hand, expanded the possibilities of communicating, working, and presenting online. It is, therefore, a particular moment to look at how two strong locally-anchored institutions can consciously operate locally as well as internationally; in physical and virtual space.”
