Dr Caterina Albano

Biography

Caterina Albano teaches and supervises doctoral students at CSM. She holds a PhD in Renaissance Studies (London University) and curates, lectures and publishes in the fields of art, cultural history and cultural theory and theory of curating. She is the author of Out of Breath: Air Vulnerability in Contemporary Art, Memory, Forgetting and the Moving Image, and Fear and Art in the Contemporary World, and has published journal articles and essays on the history of emotion, politics of memory and contemporary art, anatomy and on curating.

My research is interdisciplinary and broadly relates art, medical sciences and culture. I critically consider science as an episteme in contemporary culture, and reflect on its currency and complexities within broader cultural contexts that include the arts and humanities. My current research focuses on the cultural history of emotion, in particular on the contemporary 'culture fear' and related issues concerning the cultural constructions of phobias, anxiety, and trauma, amnesia and affect, on the politics of memory, and vulnerability.

In my curatorial capacity, I have worked on a number of projects, including major national and international exhibitions and artist projects that explore subjects as diverse as the unconscious, the cultural history of the body; neuroscience, biogenetics and the history of genetics. Both the theory and practice of curating are central to my research and curatorial work.

Curatorial work includes the exhibitions ‘Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Everyday Life’ (Science Museum, London) and ‘Crossing Over: Art, Science and Biotechnologies’ (The Royal Institution of Great Britain). She was the curatorial consultant for ‘John Snow: Cartographies of Life and Death’ (LSHTM) and for the Wellcome Trust exhibitions ‘Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love’ (Mori Museum, Tokyo) and ‘First Time Out’ (Wellcome Collection). She co-curated the exhibitions ‘Head On’ (Science Museum/Wellcome Trust) and ‘The Genius of Genetics’ (Mendel Museum, Brno). She was the senior researcher for Artakt’s two major exhibitions ‘Spectacular Bodies’ (Hayward Gallery) and ‘Seduced’ (Barbican), and curated ‘The Voice of Sex’ for the latter.

Albano convened the international symposium ‘Anxious Places: Angst, Environments and Affective Contamination’ at the Anxiety Arts Festival London 2014, and is the convener of the Art and Science Research Group (CSM), and of the Archive Forum.