Symposium on Olga Balema’s work
During this symposium on Olga Balema’s practice, curator Matilde Guidelli Guidi (Dia Art Foundation, New York) and art historian Charlotte Matter (University of Basel) will give lectures contextualizing Balema’s work within historical and contemporary discourses.
The entrance is free and both lectures are in English.
Matilde Guidelli Guidi’s talk offers an overview of Olga Balema’s work of the past decade, from her water-based, sealed-plastic Cannibals and the Elastics sculptures to Computer and the more recent Foams and Loops – bodies of work to which the artist recently returned, exploring the possibility of something new arising from reexamination and repetition of contextual formulations. Examining the throughlines in her practice, Guidelli Guidi focuses, among other, on the relationship of Balema’s work to the historical legacy of site-specific, minimalist, and process-based art since the 1960s.
Matilde Guidelli-Guidi is the curator and co-head of the curatorial department at Dia Art Foundation, where she organized exhibitions of work by Duane Linklater, Senga Nengudi, Cameron Rowland, Kishio Suga, Meg Webster, and Jack Whitten, among others, and edited the publications Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet Paintings (2023), Senga Nengudi: Populated Air (2025), and Artists on Agnes Martin (2026). She oversees Dia’s permanently sited works by Walter De Maria, Max Neuhaus, and Joseph Beuys, and as the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, she commissions a growing roster of contemporary artists to respond to their peers and Dia’s institutional history. Her upcoming projects include exhibitions of work by Alighiero Boetti, Richard Tuttle, and Éliane Radigue.
Charlotte Matter’s presentation Wounded Materials: Wear and Repair in the Work of Olga Balema examines material injury in the works of Olga Balema: fatigued elastic bands, stressed and worn down, yet tenderly repaired with knots, glue and paint; foam and vinyl that have been cut into, but also patched or bonded together with latex. The focus lies on forms of wear and wounding, foregrounding material vulnerability. These gestures are discussed in relation to the materiality of plastics – materials associated with capitalism, exploitation, exhaustion, consumption, repetition, and surface effects – while placing Balema’s work in dialogue with that of earlier artists who similarly engaged with material degradation. At the same time, the presentation considers the suture as a central aesthetic and conceptual figure through which to think about injury, but also acts of mending.
Charlotte Matter (she/her) is Laurenz Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Basel. Her research interests include feminist art, materiality, and class. Her book, Feminist Substances: Plastics in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2026. She is co-editor of Sculpture Journal and co-founder of the research project “Rethinking Art History through Disability” and the collective CARAH – Collective for Anti-Racist Art History.