Guided Tour in English of the "A Beast, a God and a Line" exhibition

Cosmin Costinas

(b. 1982, Romania) is the Executive Director/Curator of Para Site, Hong Kong since 2011. He was Guest Curator at the Dakar Biennale 2018, La Biennale de l’Art africain contemporain, DAK’ART (2018), Curator of Dhaka Art Summit 18’ (2018), Co-curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014), Curator of BAK-basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2008-2011), Co-curator of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2010), and Editor of documenta 12 Magazines, documenta 12, Kassel (2005–2007).

At Para Site, Costinas oversaw the institution's major expansion and relocation to a new home in 2015, and curated the exhibitions: 'A beast, a god, and a line’ (touring at Dhaka Art Summit ‘18, TS1/The Secretariat, Yangon, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2018); ‘Movements at an Exhibition, Manuel Pelmus’ (2017-2018); ‘Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs’ (with Inti Guerrero, touring at MCAD, Manila and Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2016-2017); ‘Creative Operational Solutions’ (with Prem Krishnamurthy, 2016-2017); ‘Afterwork’ (with Freya Chou, Inti Guerrero, and Qinyi Lim, touring at ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur, 2016-2017 and GARAGE Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2019-2020); ‘The World is Our Home. A Poem on Abstraction’ (with Inti Guerrero, 2015-2016); ‘Sheela Gowda’ (2015); the conference ‘Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The new performance turn, its histories and its institutions’ (with Ana Janevski, 2014; the homonymous major volume of original essays was published in 2017 with Sternberg Press, Berlin); ‘Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan’ (with Doryun Chong and Lesley Ma, touring at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2013-2015 and MUAC, Mexico City, 2016); ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ (with Inti Guerrero, touring at The Cube, Taipei; Arko Art Center, Seoul; and Kadist Art Foundation and The Lab, San Francisco; 2013-2015); ‘Taiping Tianguo, A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York’ (with Doryun Chong, touring at SALT, Istanbul; NUS Museum, Singapore; e-flux, New York; 2012-2014), a.o.

At BAK in the Netherlands, he curated ‘Spacecraft Icarus 13. Narratives of Progress from Elsewhere’ (2011); ‘In the middle of things by Olga Chernysheva’ (2011); ‘I, the Undersigned by Rabih Mroue’ (2010, touring at Iniva - Institute of International Visual Arts, London, Lunds konsthall, Lund; tranzit+display, Prague; and Wurttembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2011); ‘Expo Zero by Boris Charmatz’ (2010); ‘1st Former West Congress’ (with Maria Hlavajova, 2009) and ‘Surplus Value’ by Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor (2009).

Other curatorial projects include ‘After the Final Simplification of Ruins. Forms of Historiography in Given Places’, Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea, Vitoria-Gasteiz (2009) and ‘Like an Attali Report, but different. On fiction and political imagination’, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2008). He co-authored the novel Philip (2007) and has edited and contributed his writing to numerous books, magazines, and exhibition catalogs and has taught and lectured at different universities, art academies, and institutions across the world. Costinas lives and works in Hong Kong.