VV Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of its 2025 Spring Research Trip Programme, taking place from May 22–24, 2025 in Riga, Latvia. The VV Foundation Research Trip Programme is designed to introduce a selection of invited international art professionals, gallerists, curators, art critics, and journalists to the Latvian contemporary art scene.
Through curated visits to artists’ studios, galleries, museums, and artist-run spaces, the programme aims to foster the exchange of ideas and creative perspectives, support artistic experimentation, and build lasting professional connections — strengthening Latvia’s presence and recognition in the international art world.
In addition to organising guided visits for specially invited art professionals, VV Foundation also provides information about Latvian artists, institutions, and current developments upon request to researchers and other interested parties. The implementation of the programme is fully funded by VV Foundation’s own resources, demonstrating the foundation’s strategic commitment to strengthening the international visibility and professional growth of Latvian contemporary art. Such visits provide significant added value to both society and the city by promoting international cultural dialogue, the exchange of knowledge, and reinforcing Riga’s position as a prominent centre for contemporary art in the European context. As a result of this initiative, new connections are established between Latvian and international professionals, opportunities are created for our artists to participate in international projects, and the city’s visibility is enhanced in the fields of cultural tourism and the creative industries.
This season, VV Foundation is pleased to welcome eight international art professionals to Riga:
Bettina Steinbrügge
The General Director of MUDAM Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. She was previously director of Halle für Kunst Lüneburg and Kunstverein in Hamburg, senior curator and director of the contemporary art collection at the Belvedere 21 in Vienna and curator at the Kunsthalle Mulhouse. She held a professorship at the HFBK in Hamburg and taught on the postgraduate programme at HEAD Geneva. In the field of film art, she was co-curator of the Forum Expanded at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). She publishes regularly on contemporary art issues and is on the board of the Villa Romana in Florence and the Hans Platschek Foundation in Hamburg.
Mike Sperlinger
Writer and curator based in Oslo. He is currently Professor of Writing and Theory at the Oslo Academy of Fine Art. Recent independent curatorial projects include The Social Life of Film (a congress of nomadic screening collectives in Copenhagen, 2023), and a series of exhibitions with the late German artist Marianne Wex. His writing has featured in journals including Afterall, Radical Philosophy, and Texte zur Kunst as well many exhibition catalogues, including recent texts about Ed Atkins, Gerard Byrne and Laure Prouvost. He is the author of Occasional Criticism (2018), a chapbook about autobiographically-informed film writing, as well as the editor of several publications including Afterthought: New Writing on Conceptual Art (2005) and Here Is Information. Mobilise – Selected writings by Ian White (2016). Other previous positions have included Head of Programme at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (2024-5) and Assistant Director of LUX, a London-based organisation for artists working with the moving image which he co-founded with Benjamin Cook (2001-13).
Zippora Elders
Curator, passionate about leadership, connection and imagination. Currently she is Senior Curator at the renowned Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, where she is developing programming about desire and manifesting change through staging, movement, performance and choreography, in the context of a museum, city and world in transition. Before she was the Head of Curatorial Department & Outreach at Gropius Bau in Berlin, the largest exhibition hall of Europe. She has also been the director of Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, a UNESCO fort and peninsula in the water defence line of Amsterdam; a heritage site and varied community that she uplifted as a retreat for contemporary art and ecological exchange under the themes of science fiction and enchantment, healing, fertility.
Other previous appointments include a.o. curator at Foam Museum for Photography and curator-in- training at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. From 2019 until 2022, she was Co-curator for the iconic Sonsbeek quadrennial, in Arnhem, the Netherlands. She continues to be active as a guest curator, advisor and board member for international organizations.
Luigi Fassi
The artistic director of the Artissima art fair in Turin since 2022. Previously, he was the artistic director of MAN, the Museum of Art of the Province of Nuoro, from 2018 to 2022. He held the position of visual art curator at the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria, from 2012 to 2017, and from 2009 to 2012 he was the artistic director of Kunstverein ar/ge kunst in Bolzano. A Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum ISP of New York in 2008–09, he has organized exhibitions for various institutions on an international level. From 2010 to 2017 he was the curator and coordinator of the Present Future section of Artissima, Torino. In 2016 he was a fellow of the Artis Research Trip programme in Tel Aviv, Israel, co-curator of the festival Curated_by in Vienna, Austria, and of the 16th edition of the Art Quadriennale of Rome. From 2016 to 2018, he served as a curatorial committee member at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, UAE.
He was also a member of the selection committee for the Artorama contemporary art fair in Marseille (2019–22), and curator (with Nkule Mabaso) of the Tomorrows/Today project at the Cape Town Art Fair in South Africa (2019–22). An author of books and monographs, his articles and essays have appeared in Artforum, Mousse, Flash Art, Camera Austria, Site and Domus.
Krist Gruijthuijsen
Curator and art critic. He has been the director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art from 2016 till 2024. He curated exhibitions by Hanne Lippard, Ian Wilson, Adam Pendleton, Ronald Jones, Hiwa K, Willem de Rooij, Beatriz González, David Wojnarowicz, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Hassan Sharif, and Leonilson among others, and has edited numerous publications. Gruijthuijsen was artistic director of the Grazer Kunstverein (2012-2016) and course director of the MA Fine Arts Department at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (2011-2016).
He is one of the co-founding directors of the Kunstverein in Amsterdam and has organized many exhibitions and projects over the past decade, including Manifesta 7 (Trentino-South Tyrol), Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (Istanbul), Artists Space (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade), Swiss Institute (New York), Galeria Vermelho (São Paulo), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Project Arts Centre (Dublin), among others.
Emma Enderby
Director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin since 15 May 2024 and a curator, writer, and lecturer of modern and contemporary art. In February 2025, she opened her first exhibition season with presentations on Matt Copson, Sung Tieu, Miloš Trakilović and Jessica Ekomane. Previously, she was the Head of Programs and Research/Chief Curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 2021–2024. Since starting at Haus der Kunst, she curated Liliane Lijn. Arise Alive, Tony Cokes: Fragments, or just Moments, and a decentralized exhibition with Rirkrit Tiravanija. Previously, as Chief Curator at The Shed, New York, the British curator worked on founding the new institution, the overall multidisciplinary program, and curated the retrospective exhibition Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates, as well as Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matters, Ian Cheng: Life after BOB and exhibitions and commissions with Trisha Donnelly, Tony Cokes, Oscar Murillo, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Carrie Mae Weems. Emma Enderby held positions in various institutions like Public Art Fund, where she curated the group exhibitions Commercial Break and The Language of Things, as well as Tauba Auerbach: Flow Separation, among others. As exhibitions curator at the Serpentine Galleries, London, she organized numerous projects and exhibitions including with Hilma af Klint, Rachel Rose, Trisha Donnelly, and Adrián Villa Rojas. The curator further works as a visiting lecturer, critic, and speaker at a number of universities and institutions, as well as an editor and writer for multiple publications and catalogues. She holds degrees from University College London and University of Oxford.
Hendrik Folkerts
Curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Folkerts previously was Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017-2022); Curator at documenta 14, Kassel/Athens (2014-2017); Curator of Performance, Film, and Discursive Programs at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010-2015); and Coordinator of the Curatorial Program at De Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2009-2011). Folkerts specializes in performance, commissioning, and process-based exhibition-making. He has curated numerous solo and international group exhibitions as well as collection presentations, new commissions, and program series, anchored in the expanded field of performance and building on feminist, queer, and anti-colonial histories of art. The program of exhibitions, performances, and lectures Folkerts curated at the Stedelijk Museum, revolved around hosting artists and thinkers through duration and dialogue, while rethinking the museum as a critical site of public discourse and engagement. At the Art Institute of Chicago, he organized solo exhibitions and presentations of renowned international artists. Moreover, he shepherded several key acquisitions and major gifts for the Art Institute’s collection. As part of the curatorial team led by artistic director Adam Szymczyk, Folkerts was responsible for the two iterations of documenta 14, with a particular focus on the exhibition held in Kassel, Germany. Folkerts has also (co-)edited various publications and catalogues, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues.
Cosmin Costinaș
Senior Curator of Exhibition Practices at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, HKW, Berlin (since 2022). He was co-Artistic Director of the 24th Biennale of Sydney (2024); Director of Para Site, Hong Kong (2011-2022); Artistic Director of Kathmandu Triennale 2077 (2022); co-curator of the Romanian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Curatorial Adviser of the Aichi Triennale (2022); Curator of Dakar Biennale 2018 – La Biennale de l’Art africain contemporain-DAK’ART (2018); Guest Curator at the Dhaka Art Summit (2018); Co-curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014); Curator of BAK-basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2008-2011); Co-curator of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2010); and Editor of documenta 12 magazines, Vienna/Kassel (2005–2007).
At Para Site, Costinas oversaw the institution’s major expansion and relocation to a new home in 2015, and curated or co-curated the exhibitions: ‘Garden of Six Seasons’ (2020); ‘Koloa: Women, Art, and Technology’ (touring at Nuku’alofa, Tonga and Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland, 2019-2020); ‘An Opera of Animals’ (touring at Rockbund Art Museum, 2019); ‘A beast, a god, and a line’ (touring at Dhaka Art Summit ‘18, TS1/The Secretariat, Yangon, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Kunsthall Trondheim, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, 2018-2020; ‘Movements at an Exhibition, Manuel Pelmus’ (2017-2018); ‘Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs’ (touring at MCAD, Manila and Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2016-2017); ‘Afterwork’ (touring at ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur, 2016-2017); ‘The World is Our Home. A Poem on Abstraction’ (2015-2016); ‘Sheela Gowda’ (2015); the conference ‘Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The new performance turn, its histories and its institutions’ (2014; the homonymous major volume of original essays was published in 2017 with Sternberg Press, Berlin); ‘Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan’ (touring at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2013-2015 and MUAC, Mexico City, 2016); ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ (touring at The Cube, Taipei; Arko Art Center, Seoul; and Kadist Art Foundation and The Lab, San Francisco; 2013-2015); ‘Taiping Tianguo, A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York’ (touring at SALT, Istanbul; NUS Museum, Singapore; e-flux, New York; 2012-2014), a.o. At BAK in the Netherlands, he curated ‘Spacecraft Icarus 13. Narratives of Progress from Elsewhere’ (2011), as well as solos exhibitions of Olga Chernysheva’ (2011), Rabih Mroue (2010, touring at Iniva – Institute of International Visual Arts, London, Lunds konsthall, Lund; tranzit+display, Prague; and Wurttembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2011), Boris Charmatz’ (2010), and Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor (2009), as well as the ‘1st Former West Congress’ (with Maria Hlavajova, 2009). He co-authored the novel Philip (2007) and has edited and contributed his writing to numerous books, magazines, and exhibition catalogs and has taught and lectured at different universities, art academies, and institutions across the world.
