Carmen Ansaldo is a project manager, curator, writer and community facilitator working across the visual arts and music industries in Gulumerrgin/Darwin. They currently work for the City of Darwin as the Arts and Cultural Development Officer and are one of the organisers of Darwin Free University. Previously they have worked in remote and regional art centres as well as major arts institutions across the Territory, Western Australia and Queensland.
Their arts journalism has featured extensively in national and international publications over the past ten years including Art Monthly, Artlink, Ocula and The Guardian Australia. Carmen’s first major curatorial project, Groundswell: Recent movements in art and territory, toured the Territory in 2020 – 2021 and has been extended into a national tour beginning early 2022. They are currently developing a new group show of NT artists, Retribution: What happens next for exhibition at the Northern Centre of Contemporary Art in October 2022.
Carmen’s academic and visual research as an honours graduate in Art History honours (University of Queensland) and a graduate in Fine Art (Painting) (Queensland College of Art) focused on the intersection between visual art and political engagement, mainly pertaining to the social construction of nation within the scope of present-day Australia. This research formed the basis of an honours thesis exploring the properties of protest art during John Howard’s leadership of the Liberal-National Coalition Government (1996 – 2007).
Carmen works with artists, activists and community members to critique and expand current relationships between politics and the arts within the epoch of climate catastrophe. They collaborate with the ambition of developing new possibilities for how Territorians will move through what’s to come together. They do this because communalism will be our only way out.
Please make contact via:
Correspondence is welcome from artists, art workers, publications, activists and writers relating to any of the capacities noted.
Carmen Ansaldo 