Stuart Comer

Stuart Comer is The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In addition to curating Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023, with Michelle Kuo) and helping to reimagine the Museum’s collection galleries, select projects at MoMA also include Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? (2021), member: Pope.L, 1978-2001 (2019), Haegue Yang: Handles (2019), Tania Bruguera: Untitled (Havana, 2000) (2018), Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers (2016, with Peter Eleey, MoMA PS1), BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE (2016, with Rudolf Frieling, Gary Garrels, and Laura Hoptman), Bouchra Khalili: The Mapping Journey Project (2016), and Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 (2015, with Roxana Marcoci and Christian Rattemeyer). He also leads The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio and is currently overseeing the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Asia research group and The Fund for the Twenty-First Century. Prior to joining MoMA, Comer served as the first Curator of Film at Tate Modern, London and co-curated the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2014 Biennial.

Contributions

post Presents: Unsettled Dust—Archives, Epistemologies, Images

These presentations and panel discussion at MoMA brought together four filmmakers and artists who work in expanded documentary modes, using existing footage, archival research, interviews, and scripted narratives to produce imaginative accounts of transnational struggles, solidarities, and interventions. Using moving images, some of these practitioners interrogate the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the mid-late 20th…

C-MAP on the Subcontinent: New Delhi, Goa, Bangalore & Dhaka

In late January 2016, a team of seven from The Museum of Modern Art’s C-MAP Asia Group traveled to India and Bangladesh. The itinerary began in New Delhi, where the India Art Fair was underway, continuing on to Goa and Bangalore (with side-trips to Baroda and Bombay by individual group members), and concluding in Dhaka…

Revisiting India: MoMA Staff Visit Kochi, Mumbai and Delhi with a Stop in Sharjah

In March 2015 MoMA’s C-MAP Asia team took a nine-day research trip to Sharjah and three cities in India. This was C-MAP’s very first field trip focused on India, however not the first time MoMA curators have conducted research in the country. Besides the Sharjah Biennial 12: (The Past, the Present, the Possible), the second Kochi…

Burning Down the Biennials: Reports from Gwangju, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei

The year 2014 may come to be known as the year of Asian Biennials. During the second half of 2014, no fewer than six major exhibitions of international contemporary art were staged in Asia: the Yokohama Triennale (August 1–November 3) opened towards the end of the summer, followed by Media City Seoul (September 2–November 23),…

The Belated Funeral as Performance: A Dialogue with Minouk Lim

The opening performance of the 10th Gwangju Biennale, a powerful piece by Minouk Lim, took place on a rainy afternoon. A helicopter hovered over Biennale Square, where ambulances and buses converged, carrying high school students, relatives of civilian victims of the Korean War, and members of the May Mothers’ House, who lost children in the…

post Presents: Translating Feminism

The word feminism was the subject of a public conversation that took place on November 18, 2014, at MoMA. Under the heading “Translating Feminism,” Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Agata Jakubowska, and Gayatri Sinha discussed the term’s implications for artistic practice in their respective areas of scholarship. In Latin America, Fajardo-Hill argued, feminism has often been regarded as a bourgeois…