Maria Veits

Maria Veits is an independent curator and researcher. In her current and recent curatorial projects, Maria traces the ways of how manipulating information and rewriting history can be integrated in the processes of nation-building through the system of education, media, architecture and other social institutions and forms of statecraft. She explores artistic strategies of alternative knowledge production that also disclose the state mechanisms of constructing dominant, often suppressive, narratives.

Maria is a co-founder of TOK, a female curatorial collective and a nomadic platform based on principles of horizontality, collectivity, transdisciplinary exchange and knowledge-building. By initiating multilayered and durational projects that often take place outside of conventional art spaces, TOK infiltrates into various social structures in order to revisit the roles and powers of social institutions and reimagine their potential future.

Maria has curated exhibitions, residencies, symposiums, conferences, and publications. In the past few years she curated «Off to Space: Conternarrating the Cosmos» (Central for Digital Art, Holon, 2020) and co-curated «Get Real!» (Luda Gallery, St Petersburg, 2021, and Het Nieuwue Instituut, Rotterdam, 2022), «Voicing the silence» (CCI Fabrica, Moscow, 2021, apexart international open call winner 2020-2021) and «Intensive Places» (the main exhibition of the Tallinn Photomonth biennale, Tallinn, 2021).

Yiddishland Pavilion for her in an experiment and study of what an alternative to a nation state could be. In the situation of changing concept of citizenship and new forms of migration and (forced) nomadism, especially among artists, this project could be seen as an attempt to (re)create a fluid network state.