Speakers: Marta Kuzma, Artistic Director and Chief Curator of Faktura 10 and Professor at Yale School of Art; Pablo Lafuente, Artistic Director, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Bozhena Pelenska, Program and Executive Director, Jam Factory Art Center
Venue: Jam Factory Art Center, Auditorium, 124 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street, Lviv
This public conversation marks the opening of the Stammering Circle exhibition and serves as an introduction to its curatorial and conceptual foundations.
The discussion will bring together Marta Kuzma, Pablo Lafuente, and Bozhena Pelenska to reflect on the main threads, developments, and trajectories of the exhibition and its public program, The Chalk Circle. The title, a conjoining of words that draws on concepts from Paul Celan, wrestles with truth, justice, and social responsibility — themes echoed in Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
The Stammering Circle encompasses the visual, the auditory, the performative, and the dialogic. Bringing together testimony, historical material, and archival documentation, the exhibition foregrounds artistic practices that engage with the lived experience of war and its aftermath. At its core, the project reflects on displacement and exile as persistent conditions — what Paul Celan describes in The Meridian as a relentless battle with placelessness. Consequently, the umbrella of discursive public programs held in parallel to the exhibition — titled The Chalk Circle — borrows directly from Brecht’s play to frame contributions by artists, cultural producers, thinkers, philosophers, architects, musicians, and composers who respond to the threads explored in The Stammering Circle.
These programs are hosted in various venues across Lviv and Kyiv, including the Jam Factory Art Center, Lviv Polytechnic National University, the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and Dim Zvuku (Home of Sound), among others.
Marta Kuzma serves as the Artistic Director and Chief Curator of Faktura 10. Currently a tenured Professor of Art at the Yale School of Art, Professor Kuzma was the first woman to be appointed Dean in the institution’s 150-year history, a position she held between 2016 and 2021. Prior to her deanship, she was the Chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2014–2016). From 2005 to 2013, Kuzma was Director of the Office for Contemporary Art (OCA) in Norway, where she led a research-based educational and exhibition program. In the early 1990s through to 2000, Kuzma founded and directed the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv, during which time she established the SCCA Gallery at the National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 1994. During this period, Kuzma curated many projects, including Alchemic Surrender in Crimea (1994) and Boris Mikhailov’s first international retrospective (1996). At the start of her career, she led the international exhibitions program at the International Center of Photography in New York under Cornell Capa. She has co-curated international exhibitions including Manifesta 5 in San Sebastián, and authored numerous publications, most recently History of an Art School (2022), the first published history of the Yale School of Art. Kuzma is a graduate of Barnard College and completed postgraduate studies in aesthetics and art theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in London.
Bozhena Pelenska is the Program and Executive Director of the Jam Factory Art Center. She is responsible for the institution’s development strategy, program vision, and overall management. Pelenska developed the concept and program structure of the Art Center, drawing on her background in cultural studies, art history, philosophy, and arts management. She graduated from the University of Lviv and the University of Ottawa with a degree in Cultural Studies. She has participated in international programs in cultural management, cultural diplomacy, and artistic exchange, and is currently a graduate student at the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland.
Pablo Lafuente is the Artistic Director of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, a role he has held since 2020. His curatorial work includes exhibitions such as Some May Work as Symbols (Raven Row, London, 2024), Dja Guata Porã: Rio de Janeiro Indígena [Walk Well Together: Indigenous Rio de Janeiro] (MAR, 2016–17), A Singular Form (Secession, Vienna, 2014), and the 31st Bienal de São Paulo (2014). From 2008 to 2013, he was Associate Curator at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). He has also served as coordinator of the education program at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) in Rio de Janeiro (2018–20), and as a teacher and researcher at the Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia (UFSB), Porto Seguro, and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL). In addition, he was Managing Editor of Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry and of Afterall Books.
The conversation will be held in English, with simultaneous translation available on site.