Past Residents Anna Bitkina
Anna Bitkina (b.1977) St. Petersburg is an independent curator living and working in St Petersburg, Russia and in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Bitkina is a founding director of The Creative Association of Curators (TOK). Anna has more then 10 years of experience in the field of contemporary art and culture. She studied at a graduate program at the International Center for Culture and Management (a program of Leadership in Culture by Salzburg University and SMBS – Salzburg Management Business School) and at the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA) in Berlin. She holds a BA in visual arts from St Petersburg State University and Bard College (New York, NY). In 2006-2011 she worked as a program manager and a consultant for an international arts organization CEC ArtsLink in its St Petersburg brunch. In different years she worked in art galleries in New York City and in St Petersburg, at American Councils for International Education and Summer Literary Seminars. In 2004 Anna in collaboration with Maria Veits produced a documentary Lost and Found about identity of young people from post Soviet Union Republics. The film was shown on several film festivals in Europe and conferences about Russian and post-Soviet studies. Her recent curatorial projects include: Nordic Art Today: Conceptual Debts, Broken Dreams, New Horizons (2011, St Petersburg), United States of Europe (2011-2013) a traveling exhibition about European identity, 10 different locations in Europe, Towards the Other with participation of Mieke Bal and Chto Delat (2011, St Petersburg), Critical Mass international public art project (2011 – present time), Heroes of Our Time(2010, 2nd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art), Revolution Per Minute with Tommi Gronlundand Petteri Nisunen (2009, 3-rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art), H2O: Nordic and Russian Art in Public Spaces, international public art project (2009, St Petersburg).
At the moment Bitkina is preparing several events within the Nordic art Today project. During her curatorial residency at HIAP she is going to make a deep research on cutting edge curatorial and art practices in Finland in order to make a selection of further participants for Nordic Art Today project from the Finnish side. She would also like to make a research on public art in Finland that will help for the development of TOK’s regular international public art project Critical Mass in St Petersburg. The first issue of Critical Mass that took place in the summer of 2011 included two artists from Finland. Bitkina hopes to continue working with Finnish artists that specialise in public art within the Critical Massproject.