Porto Alegre, Brazil’s Fundação Bienal do Mercosul announced that Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy will serve as director of the ninth edition of the Mercosul Biennial, which is set to open Sept. 13, 2013. She is currently curator of contemporary art at the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, which is based in New York and Caracas, Venezuela.
The foundation used a smoke signal to deliver the news. The only other job appointment announced in such a way (that we’re aware of) is the election of a new pope in Vatican City. Not bad. Here’s the pertinent section of the news release:
The news was made public through a smoke signal done at the grounds of Porto Alegre’s Usina do Gasômetro, one of the city’s main cultural spaces. This signaling event, which gathered several people to the site, was an iteration of a larger communication strategy that forms part of the curatorial proposal for the 9th Mercosul Biennial: activating communication technology used across centuries.
She previously worked as director of the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City from 2009 to 2011 and was curator and programs manager at Art in General in New York from 2003 to 2008. For the Mercosul Biennial, her team will include Mônica Hoff, Raimundas Malašauskas and Bernardo de Souza, as well as four curatorial fellows, Julia Rebouças, Sarah Demeuse, Daniela Pérez and Dominic Willsdon.
