Nicolaus Schafhausen

Nicolaus Schafhausen participated in the TALK Series with a lecture which took place at Reykjavik Art Museum.

Nicolaus Schafhausen is the director of the Kunsthalle Wien. He studied art history in Berlin and Munich and worked as an artist before starting his career as a curator. He served as artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and as director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein. He was a curator at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki (NIFCA) and the founding director of the European Kunsthalle. From 2006 to 2012 he headed the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.

Schafhausen was the curator of the German Pavilion for the 52nd and the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2009. He was the curator of international festivals and exhibition, among others for the “Media City Seoul 2010” and the Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

Since 2011 Schafhausen is the strategic director of Fogo Island Arts an initiative of the Canadian Shorefast Foundation. In Cooperation with the Kunsthalle Wien he is the curator of the Bucharest Biennale 2014 (BB6). In addition to Schafhausen’s extensive experience in leading institutions and curating exhibitions, he is author and editor of numerous publications on contemporary art. Schafhausen is Visiting Lecturer at HISK, Higher Institute for Fine Arts, Gent.