Curator Name: Maya Bamberger
Residency Dates: February – April 2025
Born: 1991
Hometown: Jerusalem
Lives & Works: New Haven, CT
URL: mayabamberger.com | Instagram @mayabamberger
Education:
2021 – MAS in Curating, Zurich University of the Arts
2017 – BA in Art History and Cognitive Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Bio/Statement:
Maya Bamberger is an independent curator and scholar based in New Haven. From 2019 to 2023, she served as the curator at RawArt Gallery in Tel Aviv, where she curated numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Noam Toran’s “We Crave Blood” (2023), Ester Schneider’s “Temperance” (2023), Keren Gueller’s “Wet Collection” (2022), Dov Heller’s “Nirim” (2021), and Sagie Azoulay’s “Ernie” (2020). She also spearheaded the “Shuttle Project” (2020-2022), which supported emerging artists at the beginning of their careers. Maya has curated significant independent projects, including “Understandable Misunderstanding: How to be with art?” (2024), an online group exhibition, and Hilla Toony Navok’s “Choreographing the Public: Rolling Rooms” (2020) at OnCurating Project Space in Zurich.
Maya holds a Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) in Curating from Zurich University of the Arts (2021) and a BA in Art History and Cognitive Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017). She is a 2024 cohort member of the School of Commons and recently initiated and edited the inaugural issue of Shoket magazine for curating (2023). She has also participated in several residencies and fellowships, including a virtual residency with Triangle Brooklyn in collaboration with Artis in 2021 and a fellowship with the Alma program from 2021 to 2023.
Curatorial Statement:
“I work closely with artists through collaborative processes, deep listening, workshops, and shared readings, allowing mutual influence to emerge through moments of encounter. The geopolitics of the Middle East, particularly Israel/Palestine, shapes my work as I explore how the curatorial space can become a site for the “not-yet”—a “third-space” where relationships are formed beyond essentialist structures of domination, without erasing or reproducing them.
Thematic concerns driving my work include the unknown, chaos, systems of organization, embodied knowledge, and decolonialism. While inspired by art’s power to create “asignifying ruptures”—disruptions of established systems of meaning and order in Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic language—I am equally struck by the curatorial apparatus’s tendency to restore these systems. In response, I seek ways to remain with the rupture. One such method is Fictioning—developed by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan—a range of literary and artistic techniques that critically intervene in present realities through imaginative alternatives. These practices summon parts of ourselves that are still becoming, facilitating “coming communities.”
Resisting exhibitions as singular climactic moments of representation, I embrace the instability, imperfection, and limits of our knowledge. My curatorial practice does not represent fixed topics but thinks through and from within them in collaboration with artists who join this journey. While my methods are inherently political, I strive to create a space for art where it is not required to fulfill a specific role, which will simply echo the world as it currently exists.”
Support: Maya Bamberger’s residency is made possible with support from Artis.
