Jury for the Villa Romana Prize 2020

Yvette Mutumba is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the art magazine Contemporary And (C&). She was part of the curatorial team of the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018. In 2017 /18 she taught Discourses of Globalisation as a visiting lecturer at the Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne. From 2012 to 2016 she was curator at the World Cultures Museum, Frankfurt am Main, where she co-curated the exhibitions Ware & Wissen – or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger, El Hadji Sy: Paintings, Performance, Politics and A Labour of Love. The latter exhibition was nominated for the Global Fine Art Award 2016. In 2016 she also co-curated Focus: African Perspectives at the Armory Show, New York. Mutumba studied Art History at the Free University of Berlin and completed her doctorate at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis looked at questions of representation of art from Africa and from the diaspora in German contexts during the period from the 1960s to 2011. As an author and editor, she has produced many texts and books on contemporary art from African perspectives as well as on global art history. Her latest publication is I am built inside you, ed. by C& and ifa (Sternberg Press, 2017).

Michaela Melián was born in Munich in 1956 and lives as an artist and musician in Upper Bavaria. She has been teaching at the HfbK Hamburg since 2010 with a focus on time-related media. She initially began studying music before moving to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and then continuing her art studies in London. She has been a singer and bassist with the band F.S.K. (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle) since the 1980s, and for six years from 1980 she was co-editor of the literature journal Mode und Verzweiflung. As a musician, she has produced several albums. In addition to her work at the HfbK Hamburg, Melián has gained teaching experience at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and at the ETH Zürich.
In her artistic work, Melián develops multi-layered fields of memory that produce complex relationships from a variety of references and quotations. She undertakes intensive research to prepare for her works. She weaves a multitude of different threads to create narrative arcs, in which historical facts are contrasted with private memories and stories. In 2010 Melián was awarded the Art Prize of the city of Munich. In the same year her acoustic monument, Memory Loops, was dedicated to the victims of National Socialism and unveiled in Munich. It was selected by the German Academy for Fine Arts as the audio play of the year. In 2011 Michaela Melián received the art prize of the town of Nordhorn. In 2016 the Lenbachhaus dedicated a solo exhibition to her work: Electric Ladyland.