6 Feb 2025

CUTE – Curatorial Transnational Exchange Research Network

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During a research stay at MAC USP (March-April 2024), Laurens Dhaenens, Anneleen Masschelein and Fernanda Pitta founded the Curatorial Transnational Exchange Research Network, or the CUTE network. The objective of CUTE is to foster international (artistic) research projects, scientific and professional encounters and exhibitions, and to facilitate a network on which you can rely in the development of the project. CUTE is a starting point for collaborations, a sounding board for ideas and a gateway to knowledge.

Even though CUTE is in full development, we organised already a few events. In December 2024, we organised an expert meeting at the KMSKA and in January, we coordinated the visit of artistic researcher Glicéria Tupinambá to the Museum of Arts and History in Brussels to study the Tupinambá cape. The latter was part of the project Decay Without Mourning and was integrated in the LUCA School of Arts course Curatorial Practice that brings MA students from LUCA and KULeuven together to reflect on contemporary exhibition practices.

Follow Laurens Dhaenens:
Laurens Dhaenens is a lecturer and researcher at the LUCA School of Arts and a senior postdoctoral fellow of the Flemish Research Fund FWO at the University of Leuven. His research is situated in the fields of exhibition studies, global/worldly art history and digital humanities. Overall, it looks at the circulation of artists, artworks and texts at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. He obtained his PhD in Art History in 2017 with the study Writing Art into Being. The Imaginary Creation of The Argentinian Art Scene in Late Nineteenth-Century Art Criticism that deals with the development of the discourse about art in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. His current project, Beyond the Canon: A Digital Art Historical Approach to the International Circuit of Belgian Modern Art Exhibitions in the First Half of the Twentieth Century studies the international circulation of Belgian art, the creation of the modern art canon and the assessment of dormant heritage in national fine arts collections. Dhaenens is also active as a curator. In 2021-2022, he curated together with dr. Fernanda Pitta the exhibition Henrique Alvim Correa and 10 contemporary artists (Netwerk Aalst & Pinacoteka de Sao Paulo) that brought together fin-de-siècle drawings, popular culture and politics. In 2022, he co-curated Transatlantic Modernisms. Belgium-Argentina 1910-1958 (Mu.Zee) that looked at the development of modern art from a different geocultural perspective.