Gilane Tawadros, who was the founding director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) in London under the chairmanship of Professor Stuart Hall, has been appointed director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London. After the seminal cultural theorist’s death in 2014 Tawadros founded the Stuart Hall Foundation, which she still directs, as well as, since, 2009, heading DACS, the British artist rights and royalties organisation.
Tawadros’s appointment by the Whitechapel comes after the departure of Iwona Blazwick, who headed up the non-profit gallery for over twenty years.
An art historian by training, Tawadros has curated numerous exhibitions nationally including, in 2017, Shooting Performance: Edward Woodman and British Art of the 1980s and 1990s at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Transmission Interrupted (with Susan Cotter) at Modern Art Oxford in 2009, which featured Adel Abdessemed, Yto Barrada and Simryn Gill among the artists; Alien Nation (with John Gill and Jens Hoffman) at the ICA London in 2006, which included work by Laylah Ali, Hamad Butt, Hew Locke and Mario Ybarra Jr; and The Real Me, a year previous at the ICA, which featured Rasheed Araeen, Black Audio Film Collective, Sonia Boyce and Don Letts.
Tawadros has also organised solo exhibitions with Omer Fast, Sutapa Biswas, and Yinka Shonibare, among others. Last year she released a collection of essays spanning the period 1992 to 2017 and the work of Abdessemed, Boyce and Fast, as well as Richard Avedon, Frank Bowling, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Alfredo Jaar, Glenn Ligon and Shen Yuan.
Tawadros is the Whitechapel’s tenth director since its founding in 1901.
