Viviana Checchia is a curator, critic and lecturer active internationally. She is currently Residency Curator at Delfina Foundation, London. Previous to this role she was Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand, Gothenburg.
At Valand, she taught on the MFA, focussing on ideas of publicness and the role of the artist in society. In addition to the MFA, Checchia contributed to the Masters programme on Commissioning and Curating Contemporary Public Art, and was course leader for a new elective in, Art, Pedagogy and Social Action.
As part of this role Checchia curated Rethinking Publicness, an online symposium (2021) about the impact of COVID-19 on public practices, in collaboration with Göteborgs Konsthall and Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art. During her time in Sweden, she was an active member of museums confederation, L’Internationale, and a peer reviewer for Parse Journal.
Prior to HDK-Valand, Checchia was Public Engagement Curator at the Centre for Contemporary Arts: Glasgow (CCA). She has devoted much of her curatorial research to the global and local development of socially engaged art practice. Outcomes of this research have been disseminated through CCA by way of the symposium ‘Social Intentions’ (2016); the events programme ‘Intentions in Action’ (2016-2017); and the exhibition – and eponymous publication – ‘Forms of Action’ (2017).
Before to taking up her role at CCA, Checchia produced and contributed to a wide range of international projects, including: curating the ‘Young Artist of the Year Award’ (YAYA 2014), Ramallah; and co-curating the 4th Athens Biennale.
For the past ten years, Checchia has co-directed ‘vessel’, a curatorial platform, based in Puglia, Italy, that operates internationally to facilitate critical discussion surrounding the cultural, social, economic and political change created through community-based work.
In 2013, Checchia was a recipient of the ICI/DEDALUS Research Award for research carried out in the United States into socially engaged practices, and in 2016 she was awarded the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory Laureate’s Choice for her contributions to the understanding and international profiling of Eastern European art.
