Kirsty Robertson is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies at Western University, Canada, where she runs the Centre for Sustainable Curating.
Her pedagogy involves curating large-scale speculative and experimental exhibitions with students. In her academic work, Kirsty Robertson has published widely on activism, visual culture, and museums, culminating in her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums, Culture.
She is a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, a group of artists, scientists, and cultural researchers working on plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region, and project co-lead on A Museum for Future Fossils, an ongoing “vernacular museum” focused on responding curatorially to ecological crisis.
Kirsty Robertson’s work in the 2-12 programme residency will focus on Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through, an experimental exhibition curated by the Synthetic Collective that examines plastic as art material, cultural object, geologic process, petrochemical product, and a synthetic substance fully entangled with the human body. Plastic Heart will open at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in Fall 2021, and then travel to the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris. The purpose of this residency at the Cité internationale des arts will be to contextualize the exhibition in Paris by meeting and working with local artists whose work might be included in the exhibition, local curators, scholars, activists, and others working on ecological questions.