Inke Arns

(Germany, 1968)

Artistic conservator and teacher. Since 2005 artistic director and since 2017 director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany. She has worked internationally as an independent curator, writer and theorist specializing in media art, network cultures and Eastern Europe since 1993. She lived in Paris (1982-1986), graduated from high school in West Berlin in 1988, studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988-1996). In 2004 he obtained his doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin, with a thesis focused on a paradigmatic shift in the way artists reflected the historical avant-garde and the notion of utopia in visual and media art projects of the 1980s. and 1990 in (former)Yugoslavia and Russia.

He has curated exhibitions in the country and abroad, among others: at the Bauhaus (Dessau), Moderna galerija (Ljubljana), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum (Hagen), Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade), HMKV (Dortmund), CCA Center for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Videotage (Hong Kong), Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (Novi Sad), Zamek Ujazdowski Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), Center for Contemporary Art CAC (Vilnius), La Panacée (Montpellier), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Autocenter (Berlin), Kunsthall Charlottenborg (Kopenhagen), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Muzeum Sztuki (Łodz), NCCA (Yekaterinburg) , La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), BOZAR (Brussels), MU (Eindhoven), or exportdrvo (Rijeka). In 2021, the HMKV exhibition Artists & Agents – Performance Art and Secret Services, curated by Inke Arns, Kata Krasznahorkai and Sylvia Sasse, received the “Exhibition of the Year 2020” award from the German section of the AICA (International Association of Art Critics ). In 2019, Inke Arns received, together with Igor Chubarov and Sylvia Sasse, the 2018 Justus Bier Curator Prize for the project The Assault on the Winter Palace. HMKV received the ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize for artistic associations 2017. In 2013, HMKV's exhibition Sounds Like Silence. John Cage – 4'33” – Silence Today received the “Outstanding Exhibition of the Year 2012” award from the German section of the AICA (International Association of Art Critics). In 2011, HMKV received the JUMP Annual Sponsorship Award for Arts Organizations funded by the North Rhine-Westphalian Foundation for the Arts (Kunststiftung NRW).

Since 2021, Inke Arns has held the position of visiting professor at the Art Academy in Münster (Germany). He has taught at universities and art academies in Berlin, Leipzig, Zurich, Rotterdam and Amsterdam (2000-2017), and has lectured and published internationally. He is a member of organizations such as: ICOM; the Board of Directors of ADKV, Berlin; Net Art Anthology Advisory Committee, Rhizome, New York; Board of Trustees of the Stiftung Choreographisches Zentrum NRW, PACT Zollverein Essen.

He participated in Madialab Madrid cybervisión02_fluid dynamics within the I International Festival of Art, Science and Technology (February 4 to 17, 2002), directed by Karin Ohlenchläger and Luis Rico. The festival consisted of a
exhibition in which 17 international artists participated, a meeting-workshop and a series of conferences, organized in collaboration with the Complutense University of Madrid, the Winter Cycle of Science and Technology of the Complutense Forum, with a total of 18 conferences. Cibervisión 02, which received more than 10,000 visitors in its fifteen days, was dedicated to the topic of fluid dynamics, complex systems and self-organizing processes. The meeting-workshop on models of self-organizing systems on the Internet, in collaboration with some of the directors of the most prominent independent medialabs in Europe, such as Inke Arns (independent curator, Berlin); Eric Kluitenberg (writer, theorist and event organizer on culture and technology, De Balie, Amsterdam); David Casacuberta (professor of philosophy of science and technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona) and Walter van der Cruijsen (artist and curator).