MAITE BORJABAD LOPEZ-PASTOR,
2022
Maite Borjabad López-Pastor is a curator, architect and researcher whose work revolves around diverse forms of critical spatial practices, operating across architecture, art and performance. Having worked with important large cultural institutions, she describes her curatorial practice as “institutional infiltration” engaging at the intersection of those disciplines as well as museum studies and institutional critique.
Maite is currently curator at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum where she is working on a major reinstallation of the museum's collection. Previously as the Neville Bryan Associate Curator of Architecture & Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, she took care of the contemporary collection and led fundamental research initiatives and acquisitions to redefine the collecting strategies since she joined in 2017. In her five years tenure she also curated a number of significant installations and exhibitions including PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society (2019), My Building, Your Design: Seven Portraits by David Hartt (2018), Past Forward: Architecture and Design Collection (2017-ongoing) and Designs for Different Futures (2019-2021) co-curated with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center along with the published cataogue. Her last exhibition with Palestinain artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rhame: If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust (July 2021 - January 2022) presented a multimedia inmersive installation reflecting on ideas of amnesia, erasure, and return within the Palestinian condition. The exhibition’s visceral and material narratives raised timely and urgent questions about the ways history is constructed and continually obliterated and challenged the way museums play a role on this.
Previously she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York collaborating on the roof garden commissions and the collection. Other projects as independent curator include the exhibition and book Scenographies of Power: From the State of Exception to the Spaces of Exception (2017) at La Casa Encendida, Madrid or Wet Protocols (2018) at MAO, Ljubljana. She has also taught at the Weitzman Schol of Design, University of Pennsylvania, University of Illinois Chicago and Columbia University and has shared her research in important forums such as the Fitch Colloquium at Columbia University (2017) – Ex-Situ: On Moving Monuments where she presented “Collecting Architecture and Moving Buildings.” Maite’s writing has appeared in renowned journals as Harvard Design Magazine like her article, “Rerighting” History:The Benito Juarez Community Academy and her work has been celebrated in major media such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, PIN-UP, Domus, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Terremoto Magazine, La Tempestad or El Cultural.
