Plug In appoints new Director, Programs

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Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art Board of Directors is pleased to announce the appointment of Jenifer Papararo as Director, Programs.

Papararo has fifteen years of experience within the field of contemporary art as a curator, writer, institutional director and member of a service oriented curatorial and artist collective. In each capacity she has specialized in the production and distribution of contemporary art from mounting exhibitions, commissioning new works, publishing and learning initiatives to fundraising and partnership building.

Jenifer Papararo is currently Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) in Vancouver. During her tenure there she worked with a range of leading artists. Most recently she curated The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, a group exhibition of film and video work featuring Ed Atkins, Edgardo Aragón, Kim Beom, Rossella Biscotti, Stan Brakhage, Duncan Campbell, Fabiola Carranza, Maryam Jafri, Toril Johannessen and Shahryar Nashat. In 2013, she worked intensively with Mike Nelson to co-commission two new works exhibited at the CAG and The Power Plant, Toronto and she co-edited a book on Frances Stark’s pivotal work My Best Thing, published by CAG, Walter Phillips Gallery and Koenig Books, London.

 In 2010 she curated Triumphant Carrot: The Persistence of Still Life, which featured the work of twenty-seven artists, including Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Rodney Graham, Liz Magor, Sam Taylor-Wood and Jeff Wall; and Following A Line, featuring work by Pablo Bronstein, Peter Gazendam, Susanne Kriemann, Kyla Mallett, Alex Morrison, Paul Sietsema and Frances Stark. Prior to her current post, she was Director of Programming and Publishing at Mercer Union, Toronto. There she curated Mark Leckey’s Soundsystem, which included an extensive weekly program of events.

She is a founding member of the curatorial and artist collective Instant Coffee, whose work has been exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Toronto Sculpture Garden; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Subvision, Hamburg; Astronomical Futures, Copenhagen; Encuentro Internacional, Medellín; Sparwasser HQ, Berlin; the Americas Society, New York; and the 2nd Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, Albania.

In announcing the appointment, Noam Gonick, President of the Plug In ICA Board of Directors, stated, “We’ve followed Jenifer’s trajectory from Calgary to Toronto and her last decade as a curator in the rigorous Vancouver. Her participation and contribution to the living culture around her and her parallel praxis as a member of the Instant Coffee artists’ collective resonate with Plug In’s yearning to stretch and reignite the Institute of Contemporary Art concept, both for Winnipeg and beyond. The Plug In Board is thrilled as Jenifer starts the next chapter of the organization whose founders took Jean Cocteau’s 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles as their inspiration.”

Papararo says, “I am pleased to become part of a team that leads an organization of Plug In ICA’s stature and reputation into its next phase. Working collaboratively is imperative to my curatorial philosophy, which seems fitting to Plug In’s history and drive to mess with normative structures of hierarchy and authorship. It is within this somewhat rebellious drive that I insert myself with the hopes of criss-crossing local, national and global lines to support artists, build audiences and draw sustained relations with both.”

Papararo fills one of two new director positions, recently created as part of an organizational restructuring. Jennifer, as the Director of Programs joins Sheila Spence, Director of Administration and Development; Sheila started at Plug In August 18, 2014. Papararo and Spence will work as a team to maintain Plug In ICA’s vision and to guide its upcoming initiatives.

 Papararo begins as Director of Programs on November 17, 2014.

Report courtesy of Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art