Barbara Clausen, a curator and art historian, has been appointed rector of the Städelschule, the art school in Frankfurt, and director of Portikus, the institution’s gallery.
Clausen is especially close to performance art and theory, with previous shows including After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art (2005), Wieder und Wiider Performance Appropriated in Art and Dance (2006) and Push and Pull. Part I and Part II (2010/2011), a series of collaborations between MUMOK Vienna, Tanzquartier Wien and TATE Modern, London.
In 2010 Clausen received her PhD from the University of Vienna, Austria and two years later she curated the performance series Something to Say, Something to Do. The Politics of Authorship and History of Exhibitions, followed by the first retrospective of Babette Mangolte in 2013, both at VOX, the centre d’image contemporaine in Montreal
From 2014 to 2019 Clausen was the director of the research project An Annotated Bibliography in Realtime: Performance Art in Quebec and Canada, as well as her current research project Keeping it Live (2018–22).
She is currently a visiting professor at the Institute of Art History at Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt.
Clausen succeeds Yasmil Raymond who was rector of the Städelschule from 2020 to 2024, and she will begin her five-year term in October.
Artists Willem de Rooij, Haegue Yang and Judith Hopf are among the current faculty members at Städelschule. In November an exhibition of work by Adrian Piper opens at Portikus.
