Talk & Book Signing | Carla Arocha, Stéphane Schraenen, Madeleine Grynsztejn, Irma Boom & Barbara Vanderlinden
December 06, 20252:00 pm - 3:30 pm
About the Event
Experience a conversation moderated by MCA Chicago Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn and featuring artist duo Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen, book designer Irma Boom, and curator and author Barbara Vanderlinden, in celebration of the Chicago book launch of Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen. Monograph as Project. Authored and edited by Vanderlinden and designed by the renowned Boom, this experimental publication chronicles the solo and collaborative work of Arocha and Schraenen since 2006—including their first show together in Chicago—and includes essays by Mónica Amor, Philippe Pirotte, and Marc Donnadieu, along with interviews conducted by Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
After the talk, Arocha and Schraenen are available to sign copies of their book, which can be purchased at the event.
Access Information
English CART captioning is available for this talk.
To request additional accessibility services like ASL interpretation or audio description, please contact us at [email protected] or 312-397-4076.
About the Speakers
Carla Arocha (b. 1961, Caracas, Venezuela) and Stéphane Schraenen (b. 1971, Antwerp, Belgium) have been collaborating as an artist duo for two decades, following active individual careers. Arocha and Schraenen have gained international recognition for their sculptures, drawings, paintings, photography, and installations—particularly their signature large-scale modular mirror curtains. Arocha and Schraenen challenge perceptions of space, reflection, and reality itself. Their work critically examines the illusions and complexities of contemporary visual culture.
Since 2006, their collaborative practice has been featured in major international exhibitions, including at: FRAC Auvergne, France (2006); The Wallace Collection, UK (2011); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, USA (2013); CC Mechelen, Belgium (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2016); Fondazione Prada, Italy (2018); XIV Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador (2018); Museum of Fine Arts Split, Croatia (2019); Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium (2024); and the Busan Biennale, Republic of Korea (2024).
Work by Arocha and Schraenen is held in the collections of MoMA, New York; Chicago Art Institute; Chicago Contemporary Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA; Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB, Burgos, Spain; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France; and Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium. Their works are permanently installed in the Chicago Art Transit Center, USA; in Belgium at Hof Ter Leenen, Nevele; Tekbroek Nature Park, Puurs-Sint-Amands; and the Campus Coppens, Brasschaat.
Irma Boom is a bookmaker based in Amsterdam. She has created over five hundred books. Her experimental approach often challenges the conventions of traditional books in both physical design and printed content. Since 1992, Boom has been senior critic at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and she gives lectures and workshops worldwide. She has received many awards for her book designs and, in 2001, was the youngest person ever to receive the Gutenberg Prize. Boom’s books are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Vatican Library; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among other institutions. The Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam collect her complete oeuvre. In 2014, Boom received the Johannes Vermeer Award, the Dutch state prize for the arts. In 2019, she received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London.
Madeleine Grynsztejn is Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Under her leadership since 2008, the MCA has redefined the contemporary art museum as an artist-activated, audience-engaged space for generating art, ideas, and conversation in ways that illuminate what it means to be a citizen of Chicago and the world. Prior to the MCA, Grynsztejn was Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she curated the critically acclaimed traveling exhibitions Take your time: Olafur Eliasson and The Art of Richard Tuttle, which received a “Best U.S. Monographic Museum Show” award from the Association of International Art Critics. At the Carnegie Museum of Art, she curated the 1991/2000 Carnegie International.
Barbara Vanderlinden is an international curator, art critic, and art historian who most recently was Professor of Exhibitions Studies and Spatiality at the University of the Arts Helsinki and Director of its Exhibition Laboratory. Prior to this, she was Visiting Professor of the first International Curator Course of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation and co-authored The Manifesta Decade, Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, the first major multidisciplinary publication on current biennial and large-scale exhibition practices. Her curatorial work is associated with the decade-long experimental project Roomade and its related exhibition Laboratorium.