The 53rd International Art Exhibition from La Biennale di Venezia will take place in Venice from June 7 to November 22, 2009. The director of 2009’s International Art Exhibition is the international curator Daniel Birnbaum. Birnbaum was born in Stockholm in 1963. He studied comparative literature and history of art at the University of Stockholm, and followed these with further studies in history of art and philosophy at the Freie Universität of Berlin and Columbia University in New York. In 1998, he gained his PhD in philosophy from the University of Stockholm.

Since 2001 Birnbaum has been Rector of the Städelschule in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany, an international academy bringing together traditional and contemporary art and the development of new processes and techniques. His key role there inspired the publication of his book ‘Teaching Art: Städelschule Frankfurt am Main’. He is also director of Portikus, an exhibition space that has been part of the Städelschule since 1987. For the last ten years, Birnbaum has been a contributing editor of Artforum in New York, with which he has been working regularly since 1995. Since the early 1990s he has also written for other magazines such as Parkett and Frieze. Among his most recent critical writings are texts on Olafur Eliasson, Pierre Huyghe, Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Wolfgang Tillmans, Cerith Wyn Evans and Paul Chan. With Isabelle Graw he has recently co-edited ‘Under Pressure: Pictures, Subjects, and the New Spirit of Capitalism’ a compilation of the contributions to the same-titled conference held at the Institut für Kunstkritik from 2006-07.

Since 2001, Birnbaum has been on the board of Manifesta, and in 2003 he was co-curator of the international section of the 50th Venice Biennale. In 2004 he joined as associate curator of the Magasin 3 exhibition space in Stockholm, and in 2005, he was co-curator of the 1st Biennial of Moscow. Between 2006 and 2007, he was co-curator of ‘Airs de Paris’ at the Centre Pompidou, of ‘Uncertain States of America’ (with Hans Ulrich Obrist) at Bard College in London’s Serpentine Gallery, and of the 2nd Biennial of Moscow. In 2008, he was the co-curator of the Triennial of Yokohama and curator of the 2nd Triennial of Turin.

Full details of the Biennale can be viewed on their website http://www.labiennale.org