Lanfranco Aceti

Lanfranco Aceti is known for his extensive career as an artist, curator, and academic. In 2021 he has exhibited a large art project at the Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Hashim Sarkis. His project, part of the Italian pavilion curated by Alessandro Melis, is titled Preferring Sinking to Surrender. He is the founder of The Studium: Lanfranco Aceti Inc.

As an artist Aceti has exhibited numerous personal projects including the public performance Car Park part of Internet of Cars curated by Helen Sloan for SCAN and the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On); Shimmer, a series of sculptural, photographic, and painting works curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra; a large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.

As a curator Aceti worked as director of Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, where he exhibited a range of innovative artworks including 75Watts by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, acquired by MoMA, and Paolo Cirio’s Loophole4All, awarded the 2014 Golden Nica at Ars Electronica. He curated The Small Infinite at the John Hansard Gallery with artworks never previously exhibited from the estate of John Latham. Aceti has participated in numerous art fairs such as Art Athina, Art International, Supermarket, and Contemporary Istanbul, either as a curator or as an artist. In 2011, he curated the exhibition Uncontainable as part of the parallel events of the 12th Istanbul Biennial and exhibited artworks on the media facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. In 2016 he curated a range of artworks as part of THE SOCIAL at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other public spaces in Boston and London. In 2017 he curated a new public performance by Stefanos Tsivopoulos, One Step Forward Two Steps Back, on the White House sidewalk in collaboration with the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University and Ad Nauseam a public intervention for documenta14. He is currently curating empty pr(oe)mises for the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and developing new curatorial projects.

As an academic Aceti is the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (The MIT Press, Leonardo journal), for which he has edited more than 12 volumes. He also founded in 2017 Contemporary Arts and Culture (CAC), a platform for art publications and collaborations by MIT Press and Leonardo Journal housed at MIT. He has given lectures internationally at prestigious institutions such as Yale, Harvard, RCA, Goldsmiths, New York University, Goldsmiths, and Central Saint Martins. His writings have been published in numerous international academic journals: MIT Press, Routledge, Sage, and Oxford University Press. He was a non-residential international fellow at HDS @ Harvard University and research affiliate at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is now working on several new publishing projects: Prostitutional Aesthetics, Art and Anger, Alarm!, and on two pamphlets on education titled Ten Reasons Why Not to Pay for a College Degree and Ten Ways to Identify Fake Colleges that Sell Degrees. He is also collaborating with Dolores de Alma Blanca editing and translating her collections of poems and her novels.