Team

Çağla Ilk is a curator and architect. Since 2020, she has been director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden together with Misal Adnan Yıldız. Ilk works in theory and practice at the interface of architecture, visual arts, sound, and performance. She uses dramaturgy as a method of curating and integrates transdisciplinary approaches into her curatorial practice. Her exhibition methodology follows the idea of working with events and installations that change and make transitions visible, instead of static forms of exhibition making. Ilk studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and Mimar Sinan University Istanbul. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including the solo exhibitions Sarkis 7 Tage, 7 Nächte (2023), Jan St. Werner Space Synthesis (2023), Candice Breitz Whiteface (2023), Yvonne Rainer Hellzapoppin: What about the Bees? (2023), Jimmy Robert All dressed up and nowhere to go (2022/2023), and Ulrike Ottinger Cosmos Ottinger (2022) as well as the group exhibitions Nature and State (2022) und State and Nature (2021) at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. Ilk was also co-curator of the 6th Ural Biennial in Yekaterinburg (2021) and chief curator of Studio Bosporus (2021), the nationwide interdisciplinary festival of the German Foreign Office. From 2012–2020, Ilk was dramaturge and curator at the Maxim-Gorki-Theater in Berlin, where she was responsible for cross-disciplinary projects and festivals that combined performing, performative, and visual arts, often in a transcultural context. Ilk has co-curated 4 editions of the Berliner Herbstsalon at the Maxim-Gorki-Theater. She was active in cultural policy as a member of the presidium of the neuen Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), as a member of the Council for the Arts Berlin, and on numerous juries for cultural funding. In March 2023, Çağla Ilk was appointed as the curator of the German contribution to the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. She lives and works in Berlin and Baden-Baden.Çağla Ilk lives in Berlin and in Baden-Baden.

Misal Adnan Yıldız is a curator, educator and researcher. His current roles include those of director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, a post he has been sharing with Çağla Ilk since May 2020. He is the former director of Artspace Aotearoa in Auckland (New Zealand) (2014–2017) and prior to this, he held the position of artistic director at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (Germany) (2011–2014). Yıldız co-curated the main exhibition for the 6^th Ural Industrial Biennial for Yekaterinburg city in Russia. He has been a PhD candidate on exhibition architecture at HFC Hamburg (Germany) since 2019; and was a member of the working and advisory board of The New Center for Research & Practice in Seattle (USA) (2020). Yıldız completed the double major program in psychology and educational sciences at the Boğaziçi University, and later studied visual arts and visual communication design at the Sabanci University, both in Istanbul (Turkey). He participated in the traveling curatorial studies program at the Konstfack, Curatorlab in Stockholm (Sweden), and also completed the Independent Research program at Valand Art Academy.

Christina Lehnert has been curator at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden since 2022. From 2018 to 2022 she was curator at Portikus in Frankfurt am Main. Previously, she was director of the Kunstverein Braunschweig and received a curatorial fellowship from the Gebert Foundation for Culture in Switzerland. She has worked at various institutions, including the Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, where she remains a member of the international acquisitions committee. In recent years, she has developed a series of exhibition projects focused on art as an expression of political moments, with an emphasis on sound and performance. This has resulted in projects with artists* such as William Pope.L, Georgia Sagri, Lydia Ourahmane, Willem de Rooij, Alia Farid, Hajra Waheed, Leo Asemota and Nástio Mosquito, among others. She studied philosophy and art history at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Since summer 2022 Dominik Busch is the digital curator at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. He was previously curator and head of the department for Public Discourse & Mediation at Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen. His main areas of engagement are discursive, political, and digital mediation, contemporary artistic and discursive practices, the role of museums in society and collective practices as a way of participation and organization. Busch studied modern German literary studies, art and art education in Wuppertal and Düsseldorf, receiving his first states exam in 2012. From 2012-2014 he was a PhD candidate at the University of Cologne, researching curatorial theories of the 1990s. Since 2023 Dominik Busch is a board member of ICOM Germany.