Abir Boukhari

Abir Boukhari is a Syrian-Swedish curator based in Stockholm, awarded the Stockholm City Cultural Scholarship (2021) and the Art Promoter of the Year award in Sweden (2025). Her curatorial practice focuses on international collaboration, transnational dialogue, and the role of art in contexts shaped by migration, displacement, and cultural exchange. She is currently developing the Exile City Pavilion for the Gwangju Biennale, scheduled for 2026.

Boukhari is co-founder and director of AllArtNow since 2005 and founder of Extension Art Space. Through both initiatives, she has built an international curatorial practice that connects artists, curators, and institutions across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America.

Her work often explores how artistic practices move across borders and how cultural production can respond to political transformation, collective memory, and shifting identities. Many of her projects create encounters between artists from different regions, forming temporary networks of dialogue through exhibitions, research platforms, and residency programmes.

Over the past two decades Boukhari has curated and co-curated numerous international exhibitions and collaborative projects, including Moderna Museet, Botkyrka Konsthall, World Cultural Museum, Sormlands Museum in Sweden, Pori Museum in Finland, Bornholm Museum in Denmark and Videoformes Festival in France. Her curatorial projects have taken place in cities including Stockholm, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Cairo, Naples, Algiers, Tunis, Winnipeg, and Los Angeles.

Boukhari studied curatorial practice at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design through CuratorLab. Her work continues to develop international platforms for artistic exchange while maintaining a strong commitment to independent curatorial initiatives.

Art Space as Curatorial Practice

An art space can become a curatorial method through which ideas are developed, produced and shared. It does not always require a physical site. It can exist as a concept, a name, and a framework for realizing projects. Rather than curating under a personal name, a curator can work through the identity of the space, allowing it to carry a curatorial voice. Its location, architecture, movement, surroundings and relationships with artists inspire the practice. It can also invite audiences, colleagues and guest curators to contribute or host their own practices. Taking AllArtNow as a case study, this presentation considers how an art space can move between cities, languages and cultural contexts without reproducing a fixed model.
Where does the curator end and the art space begin, and can the art space itself become the curatorial practice of the curator?