Spanish curator Nuria Enguita is the new artistic director of MAC/CCB

Spanish curator Nuria Enguita, 57, will be the artistic director of the new Museum of Contemporary Art at the Belém Cultural Centre (MAC/CCB) in Lisbon, the board of directors of the Belém Cultural Centre Foundation announced late this week.

The curator, born in Madrid in 1967, will start work in May on the successor to the Berardo Collection Museum and will remain in Lisbon for a period of four years.

With the appointment of Nuria Enguita, all the modern and contemporary art museums belonging to the country's most important cultural foundations (Gulbenkian, Serralves and Centro Cultural de Belém) will be run by foreigners.

Philippe Vergne was appointed in 2019 to the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, and Benjamin Weil arrived in 2020 at the Gulbenkian Modern Art Centre in Lisbon. The choice of the Spanish curator was the result of an international open call launched by the CCB in 2023.

Until very recently, Nuria Enguita was the director of the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) in Valencia, the cultural institution from which the first director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Vicente Todolí, left in the 1990s. It was at the IVAM, under Todolí's direction, that she began her career as a curator, in 1991 to be precise. She left in 1998 to direct the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, where she stayed until 2008.

Nuria Enguita, born in Madrid in 1967, is an art historian, editor and curator. She arrived at the IVAM, which she directed between 2020 and 2024, from the Bombas Gens Art Centre, also in Valencia, after the aforementioned stint in Catalonia. The CCB press release recalls that, as an independent curator, she organised exhibitions in Spanish and Portuguese institutions between 2008 and 2015. She was co-curator of the 31st São Paulo Biennial in 2014, the Encuentro Internacional de Medellín in 2011 and the Manifesta 4 biennial in Frankfurt in 2002.

With a degree in Art History and Theory from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, she has taught art theory and management at numerous centres and universities and has published texts in contemporary art magazines such as Parkett, Afterall and Concreta, the statement said. "Her institutional practice is defined by her direct work with collections and the social contexts in which they are generated and presented. Her work seeks to make visible artistic practices usually relegated to the margins of official histories and canonical modernity."