Who is Nuria Enguita, the Spanish curator chosen as the artistic director of MAC/CCB

Spanish historian, editor and curator Nuria Enguita is the new artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art — MAC/CCB, the Board of Directors of the Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém announced today.

Nuria Enguita, who until last month was director of the Instituto Valencia de Arte Moderna (IVAM), in Valencia, Spain, a position from which she resigned, was chosen through an international competition and will begin her role in May.

MAC/CCB, in Lisbon, created after the extinction of the Fundação de Arte Moderna e Arte Contemporânea — Coleção Berardo, was opened in October last year.

The competition jury opted for the project presented by Nuria Enguita, “highlighting not only its consistency and sense of opportunity, for which her extensive curatorial and directorial experience at other institutions is relevant, but also her knowledge of the reality Portuguese”.

“The qualities of historiographical rigor, museological competence and a comprehensive and transversal vision of the world of art materialized in the work proposal presented, reinforcing the idea of ​​’common ground’ that has been worked on at the CCB”, reads the statement.

Núria Enguita will serve as artistic director of MAC/CCB for a period of four years and will direct a team that includes the chief curator for Visual Arts, Rita Lougares, and the chief curator for Architecture, Mariana Eyelash.

39 candidates responded to the international competition to select the new artistic direction of MAC/CCB, most of them from outside Portugal.

Nuria Enguita, who was born in 1967, was director of IVAM between 2020 and February this year, “where she established an exhibition program at the highest level, starting not only from the collection”, with exhibitions such as “Arte en una tierra baldía (1939– 1959)”, but also temporary presentations, including names such as Anni and Josef Albers, Asger Jorn, Grupo Zero, Zanele Muholi, Teresa Lanceta, Anna Boghiguian, Otobong Nkanga, and young artists from the local context”.

The IVAM program announced for this year, under the direction of Nuria Enguita, foresees for the months of May to September, the exhibition “The power with which we jump together. Women artists in Spain and Portugal between dictatorship and democracy”, in collaboration with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

The CCB Foundation also highlights, in the statement released today, that during the direction of Nuria Enguita of IVAM “the Articulacions study program was developed, in collaboration with the two public universities in Valencia, and public programs acquired a central dimension in the museum” .

According to the Spanish agency EFE, Nuria Enguita resigned from her position as director of that museum in Valencia due to alleged irregularities in a donation.

The curator had been appointed to the position in 2020, by a jury that included art curator Vicente Todolí, after whom the Todolí Citrus foundation is named, the largest private foundation in the world dedicated to citrus fruits, to which Nuria Enguita made, in 2022, a donation of land with 25 other people.

The Government of the Valencia region, through the Ministry of Culture, headed by Vicente Barrera, from the far-right party Vox, informed the Public Ministry of the donation, presenting facts that it considers could be considered “indicative of a possible criminal offense”, it reported the Spanish newspaper El Pais, in February.

When she resigned from her position, Nuria Enguita made it known that the donation of “two unproductive rural lands” was made to a “non-profit” foundation, as part of a ‘crowdfunding’ campaign in which more than 25 people participated, including including renowned artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Miroslaw Balka, Cristina Iglésias and Nan Goldi.

The curator considered it to be a “slanderous campaign” on “a topic strictly in the private sphere”.

The Association of Contemporary Art Directors in Spain came out in defense of Nuria Enguita’s “rigor and professionalism”, through a statement published in the Spanish press.

Before IVAM, Nuria Enguita was director, between 2015 and 2020, of the Bombas Gens Art Center, also in Valencia, and between 1998 and 2008 of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation, in Barcelona.

Between 2008 and 2015, as an independent curator, she organized exhibitions in Spanish and Portuguese institutions.

Nuria Enguita graduated in Art History and Theory from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1990.

The CCB Foundation states that, since 1991, Nuria Enguita’s institutional practice “is defined by direct work with collections and the social contexts in which they are generated and presented”, and that “her work seeks to make visible artistic practices that are usually relegated to the margins of official histories and canonical modernity”.