Alessandra Franetovich has a PhD in contemporary art history, is a critic and curator. She is a research fellow at the University of Florence, and teaches at Naba, Milan, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona. She has curated exhibitions and artistic residencies, and her writings have been published in catalogues and magazines as the e-flux journal, Middle Plane, Castello di Rivoli, Centro Pecci, Dune and Cosmic Bulletin. She is working on her upcoming book about post-1989 in Italian art.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Between 2017 and 2022 I completed my PhD in contemporary art history (extended due to covid), on the topic "The archive as a self-institutionalization device: Vadim Zakharov and the archive of Moscow conceptualism". During this period I carried out research periods in Berlin, at the artist's studio and at the Humboldt Universitat and the Freie Universitat, and in Moscow, at the Moscow Garage Contemporary Art Museum, and the V-A-C Foundation. For my research I received scholarships from Quadriennale di Roma, Regione Toscana, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, V-A-C foundation. In 2019 I won the Moscow Prize for young Italian curators organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, consisting of a six-month residency in Moscow. I have lectured on my research in Italy and abroad, and published articles. In addition to this, I have continued my curatorial practice, with personal or collective exhibitions. Since 2019 I have been a member of the curatorial committee of Cripta747 in Turin, where I have curated exhibitions, events and co-curated the international fellowship for artists, researchers and curators. Since 2017 I have been the scientific director of the Cantieri Aperti festival, Massa, for which I have curated and co-curated exhibitions and artist residencies. In 2018 I collaborated as a researcher on Hito Steyerl's personal exhibition catalog at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art. I am currently working on the next exhibition project which will be at Casa Alberto Savinio, while the last exhibition curated was Arseny Zhilyaev's solo exhibition "Lingua Madre" at the C+N Canepaneri gallery in Milan. Since April 2024 I have been a fellow researcher at the University of Florence, where I deal with the contemporary section of the Border(E)scapes project, coordinating the project to create the database and the website, as well as carrying out original individual research on the theme of the border and of the border landscape from an art historical perspective. Previously, between 2022 and 2023 I was recipient of the annual post-doc grant from the Rome Quadrennial, to carry out research on contemporary Italian art . For this fellowship I wrote a volume on post-1989 Italy, to be published soon. On this topic I have a course in Contemporary Methodologies and Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona, while at NABA, Milan, I co-teach History of Contemporary Art.
