Dr. phil. Belinda Grace Gardner,

art theorist, critic, independent curator

Born in Durham, North Carolina, USA,

lives and works in Hamburg, Germany.

M.A. in English and German literature and linguistics at the Georg August University, Göttingen with a thesis on the "unconventional love sonnet from the Renaissance to Modernism."

PhD in aesthetic theory and visual studies with a dissertation on figurations of the ephemeral in contemporary art, “Transitorisch: Strategien gegen die Vergänglichkeit. Gestaltgebungen des Ephemeren von Meret Oppenheim bis Christian Boltanski” ('Transitory: Strategies against Evanescence – Meret Oppenheim to Christian Boltanski') at the University of Art, Braunschweig, Institute for Art Theory.

Author/Art Critic/Journalist/Editor

From 1988 onward reporter and critic for various and magazines newspapers; from 1992 to 1996 managing editor for the arts section at the weekly paper Hamburger Rundschau; since 1996 multiple book and catalogue publications and hundreds of articles and contributions as a freelance art critic and author for national and international art journals and online magazines, as well as for radio stations in Germany and Switzerland.

Teaching

Since 2006 seminars in art theory and art history, visual and media studies, and art in the public sphere/art and society at various universities and art academies, among these the Academy of Fine Arts, Münster, the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, the Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, the Free University of Bozen–Bolzano, and the Leuphana University, Lüneburg.

Research Interests

Pictorial concepts of the ephemeral and constructions of romantic love through art history; transcultural and transmedial constructions of reality, identity, memory, place, and space; (post-) colonial and digital rewritings of reality in current art before the backdrop of global scenarios of crisis, migration, and displacement in shifting societies; interdisciplinary and socio-critical/political forms of aesthetic activism, and genre-transgressing manifestations of art in public spaces today, as well as interrelationships between art and science.

Independent Curator

Exhibitions include: True Romance. Allegories of Love from the Renaissance to the Present (Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, 2007–2008); The Ear of Giacometti. (Post-)Surreal Art from Meret Oppenheim to Mariella Mosler (LEVY gallery, Hamburg, 2010/2011); Psychogeographic Junction, (Kunsthalle Bratislava: LAB, 2015); The Material of Memory. After-Images of Recollection (Künstlerhaus + Abbildungszentrum FRISE, Hamburg, 2016); RE/WRITING REALITY (flat1,  Vienna, 2017), Radical Twilight. Excursions into the Gray Zones of Reality (Frappant gallery, Hamburg, 2019), Ennui. States of Suspension, MOM art space, Gängeviertel, Hamburg, 2023, OBLIQUE. Navigations between Slanted Angles and Shadow Zones, 8. Salon, Hamburg, 2024, Forces of Attraction (ARTSCIENCELAB), DESY, Hamburg, 2024; Politics of Love, Kunsthaus Hamburg (in collaboration with Anna Nowak), 2024/2025.