Biographical Information
Thomas D. Trummer was born in 1967 in Bruck an der Mur in Austria and is working as a freelance curator.
Trummer studied art history, philosophy and music at the University of Graz. As a guest curator at Grazer Kunstverein he co-curated several exhibitions with Eva Maria Stadler for the “steirischer herbst” arts festival. While still a student, Trummer became an assistant in the Department of Art History at the University of Graz. From 1990 to 1999 he taught contemporary and modern art and history of aesthetics. In 1996 he was appointed curator of modern and contemporary art at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna. In this position Trummer established the “Atelier Augarten” (now called “Augarten Contemporary”), an exhibition space for contemporary art and artist-in-residence project at the Belvedere. Exhibitions have been held here regularly since the space opened in 2001, including solo shows by Panamarenko, Valie Export and Markus Schinwald, as well as thematic exhibitions such as The Waste Land, Trauer (Grief), Ulysses and Déjà-vu.
Following an international competition held in 2006, Trummer – who was also vice-president of the Austrian section of the AICA (International Association of Art Critics) from 2005 to 2007 – became the first recipient of the “Hall Curatorial Fellowship” awarded by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In the context of this year-long residence in the United States he curated the exhibition Voice & Void, featuring works by Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Cerith Wyn Evans and Christian Marclay, among others.
Since 2007, Trummer, who has organized more than 50 projects and is a widely published author on contemporary art and philosophical aesthetics, has been developing exhibition concepts for Siemens Arts Program, based in Munich. To date these have included Zidovi na ulici / Walls in the Street, (cat.) Muzej savremene umetnosti, Belgrade; Endless Sphere / Безкрайня сфера, (cat.), Centre for Contemporary Art, Kiev; I Repeat Myself When Under Stress, (cat.) Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
Trummer also holds lecturing posts at the University for Art and Industrial Design in Linz and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
