The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Daniela Zyman is a Vienna-based writer, curator, and Artistic Director of TBA21 – Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, based in Madrid, Spain. Since the foundation of TBA21 in 2003, she has played a central role in shaping its program, curating over fifty exhibitions, and contributing extensively to its publishing and commissioning initiatives. Her curatorial practice is rooted in material culture, artistic research, and ecological and post-disciplinary knowledge forms. She consistently engages with alternative epistemologies and speculative modes of world-making, positioning artistic research as a space of critical imagination and ecological thought. Previously, Zyman served as Chief Curator at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna (1995-2001), where she co-founded the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2003, she was Artistic Director of the Künstlerhaus in Vienna and Director of A9 Forum Transeuropa. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and has lectured at institutions including the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2024, she published The Laughter of the Jellyfish (German edition, Walther König), a monograph that articulates a prefigurative, antagonistic approach to artistic research and traces a genealogy of emergent counter-methods.

This talk reflects on how curatorial practice can serve as research-based and pedagogically driven sense-making–a space of reflection on rapidly changing realities and for harnessing creative forces committed to recomposing the damaged world inside and out. Drawing on recent curatorial projects—Territorial Agency: Oceans in Transformation (Venice), Remedios: Where New Land Might Grow (Córdoba), and Terraphilia: Beyond the Human (Madrid)—the talk proposes curatorial methodologies attuned to the intersecting urgencies of environmental breakdown, historical reckoning, and political disintegration.

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