Ruth Noack


Ruth Noack is a German curator and art historian. Noack and Roger M. Buergel, co-curated documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. In 2019, it was announced that Noack would become the founding executive director of The Corner at Whitman-Walker, a new cultural institution in Washington, D.C., opening in early 2020 as a venue for multidisciplinary artistic expression attached to Whitman-Walker Health.

Education

After graduating from Alten Gymnasium in Bremen she studied art history, audiovisual media and feminist theory in Germany, the U.S., England and Austria. She began lecturing in 1990 and published her first critical work in 1992. In 1999 she completed graduate work in art history at the University of Vienna with a MA-thesis on the subjectification processes in the visual arts, exemplified by the early work of Lynn Hershman. In 2000 she began teaching at the University of Vienna, the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Since 2001 Noack has worked on the topic "Construction of Childhood" in the context of a research project. In all of her activities, Noack adopts an interdisciplinary approach that closely incorporates film theory.

Work

Noack's writings have been concerned with subjects including global art and the translocal museum, conceptual art in the East, feminist aesthetics and film theory. Noack’s numerous publications and lectures include monographs on the work of Eva Hesse, Alejandra Riera, Danica Dakic, Ines Doujak, Sanja Ivekovic and Mary Kelly. In 2002-2003 Noack served as President of AICA Austria. In 2006 and 2008 she was a member of the jury for the CCAA. During the 2012-2013 academic year Noack was Head of Programme, Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London and acted as Research Leader for the EU project "MeLa – European Museums in an age of migrations."
Her writing appears regularly in international journals and magazines, including_ springerin_, Texte zur Kunst, Camera Austria and Afterall.

Exhibitions