Since 2008, Kiosko has also invited international curators to share their residency with Bolivian artists. This Curator-in-Residence programme, which takes place once per year, is critical to the improvement of the artistic practice in Santa Cruz as it provides local artists the opportunity to exchange ideas and benefit from the the curators’ broad knowledge on international contemporary artistic practices and discourse. Furthermore, the international curators’ residencies provide the opportunity to incorporate research and theory into their space and programme. Having curators that can look at the local art scene and production with a critical perspective is of utmost importance for the development of contemporary art in Bolivia.
Agatha Wara, an artist and curator of Bolivian heritage born in Lima, Perú and currently based in Miami, Florida, was the most recent curator-in-residence at Kiosko in the Spring of 2010. Her curatorial research centers on issues related to institutional critique and community-based progressive art education. Hence, for her residency at Kiosko she posed questions to the art community of Santa Cruz related to these research topics.
“At the beginning of my residency I focused my investigations on art education in Santa Cruz and Bolivia as a whole. I was interested in finding out how artists develop their practice in a context where art education is greatly underdeveloped. […] What I found interesting is that although many artists that I met studied these alternate professions like architecture or graphic design, the overall level of the visual arts in Santa Cruz is very high. There are few artists but they are working in very interesting languages outside of the traditional "white-cube", mainly because of the lack of it. Many of these Bolivian artists are turning to performance or action art with great results.”
The opportunity of meeting and exchanging ideas with so many Bolivian and other Latin American artists was invaluable to Wara:
“I came to Santa Cruz de la Sierra's KIOSKO gallery residency with plans of integrating myself into the artistic community through dialogue with local artists and peripheral explorations with sociologists and writers. I believe that I accomplished this main goal and found the experience at KIOSKO life-changing and incredibly stimulating.”
As an outcome of her residency at Kiosko, Wara started re-directing her curatorial career devoting more attention to the art production of Latin America. So far she has organized two separate exhibitions showing the work of Bolivian artists abroad. One of these exhibitions was co-curated with independent curator Maria Schneider. This video exhibition titled "QUIEN" will be shown as part of the Ex-territory Project in Tel-Aviv, Israel in June 2010. Exterritory will take form as on-sea event; a boat will be located in international waters outside of Tel-Aviv with videos by Bolivian and Latin American artists projected onto the sails of the boat.