Inke Arns

Dr Inke Arns, born in 1968 in Duisdorf near Bonn, is a curator and author specializing in media art, network cultures and Eastern Europe. She has been artistic director of the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) in Dortmund since January 2005.

Following a four-year period spent in Paris (1982–1986), Arns studied Eastern European studies, Slavonic studies, political science and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam between 1989 and 1996. She wrote her thesis on the artistic group Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK – New Slovenian Art), which was published in 2002. In the PhD paper she presented in 2004 at the Institute for Slavonic studies at Humboldt University Berlin, “Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear: Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel”, Arns examines the paradigmatic shift in the reception of the historical avant-garde and of the concept of Utopia in (media) art projects in the 1980s and 1990s in former Yugoslavia and Russia.

Arns began working as a curator in the 1990s, organizing various exhibitions and conferences on international media art such as “OSTranenie 93: Erschütterte Mythen, Neue Realitäten. Osteuropa im Blick der Videokamera” (Ostranenia 93: Shattered myths, new realities. Eastern Europe as seen on video camera) at the Bauhaus Dessau in 1993 and “V2_East Meeting on Documentation and Archives of Media Art in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe” in Rotterdam in 1996. From 2002 to 2004 she was a visiting lecturer at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) Leipzig; her other teaching and lecturing activities include her involvement in the transmediale in Berlin (2006), the Ars Electronica in Linz (2004), symposia and lectures at the Tate Modern in London (2005), at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the University of Aarhus, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (2004), Humboldt University Berlin and various branches of the Goethe-Institut.

Arns is a publisher of numerous exhibition catalogues and co-founder of various networks and groups involved in media culture. She regularly publishes on subjects related to media art and network culture. Her essays can be found online, for instance in Media Art Net. Her most recent publication is “East Art Map. Art and Eastern Europe” (London, 2006).