Mumbai-born curator and writer Zasha Colah has been chosen to curate the Thirteenth Berlin Biennale, slated to take place in summer 2025. Colah earlier this year was named co-artistic director, with Francesca Verga, of ar/ge kunst Bolzano in northern Italy’s South Tyrol province.
Raised in Zambia and India, Colah served as curator of Indian modern art at JNAF/CSMVS Museum and curator of public programs at the National Gallery of Modern Art, both in Mumbai. In 2010, she cofounded the Mumbai-based Clark House Initiative alongside Yogesh Barve, Sachin Bonde, Poonam Jain, Prabhakar Pachpute, Amol K Patil, Rupali Patil, Nikhil Raunak, and Sumesh Sharma. The collaborative effort among curators and artists, which ended in 2022, was centered around issues of freedom and took its cues from organizations including the Black Panther Party and the Fluxus Group as well as from artists such as AA Raiba, Joseph Beuys, Frantz Fanon, and Nil Yalter, and political reformers BR Ambedkar and Cheikh Anta Diop.
In 2014, Colah began dividing her time between Mumbai and Berlin. In 2016, she curated the exhibition “body luggage” at Graz, Austria’s steirischer herbst festival. The following year, she served as a co-curator, with Luca Cerizza, of India’s Third Pune Biennale, “Habit-co-Habit. Artistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces in India.” Since 2017, she has been based in Turin, Italy, during which time she was part of the curatorial team of China’s Second Yinchuan Biennale, “Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge,” in 2018. That same year, she took on the role of lecturer in curatorial studies at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, where she still teaches. In 2020, she received her doctorate from Sapienza – Università di Roma; her thesis explored illegality and meta-exhibition practices in Indo-Myanmar beginning in the 1980s. Also in 2020, she joined Archive, a decentralized community of practice with members in Berlin, Dakar, and Milan, under whose auspices she co-curates exhibitions.