Counterpublic 2026: The Curatorial Ensemble
Counterpublic returns in 2026 from September to December with one of the largest public exhibitions in the nation featuring a new curatorial ensemble: Jordan Carter, Raphael Fonseca, Stefanie Hessler, Nora N. Khan, and Wanda Nanibush.
Counterpublic connects art with lasting impact, bringing together bold ideas with the most pressing challenges of our time while working across civic, community and cultural partners at all scales to build up an ecosystem of collaboration and generational change. Each three-year cycle focuses on a new set of dynamic sites and questions, remaining responsive to the moment and aligning with the most impactful opportunities in our region.
For the 2026 edition, we aim to bring more than 250,000 people together in St. Louis from around the world to explore our shared futures: climate and ecologies, education, generative technologies, Native sovereignty, food systems and more. Across its many components, the exhibition will uplift the region, creating direct impact in our communities and sustaining lasting change through our unique model of civic investment and cultural systems building.
We have gathered an ambitious, globally-oriented team of curators to shape the new edition. The curatorial ensemble has already begun working together to interpret and convert a year of community feedback into an exhibition that reflects a joyous and inclusive vision of St. Louis’ future.
Jordan Carter
Jordan Carter joined Dia Art Foundation as curator and co–department head in 2021. Since then, he has curated exhibitions of work by stanley brouwn, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Maren Hassinger, and Mary Heilmann, among others, for Dia Beacon, and commissioned a new moving-image installation by Tony Cokes for Dia Bridgehampton.
Forthcoming projects include presentations of Lucas Samaras’s and Keith Sonnier’s work, a multipart commission by Cameron Rowland, and Renée Green’s first major solo museum exhibition in New York featuring new and historical works, all opening at Dia Beacon in 2024–25. Carter oversees the preservation of and programming around Dia’s permanent installations, including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), both in Utah, as well as the stewardship of Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018).
He previously served as associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Carter has also held curatorial and research positions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He received a BA from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he focused on Fluxus and global Conceptual art.
Raphael Fonseca
Raphael Fonseca is a researcher in curating, art history, art criticism, and education. He works as a curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art at the Denver Art Museum. He is the chief curator of the 14th Mercosur Biennial, to take place in March 2025 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He curated the 22nd SESC_Videobrasil Biennale, along with Renée Akitelek Mboya and Solange Farkas in 2023. He worked as a curator at MAC Niterói (Contemporary Art Museum of Niterói, Brazil) from 2017 to 2020. He holds a PhD in Critic and Art History (State University of Rio de Janeiro).
The juxtaposition of different temporalities and how this can trigger contemporary reflections for audiences is crucial in his practice. Humor, absurdity, pop culture, and the notion that an exhibition relates to the ideas of assembly, set design, and spectacle have grown among his research interests. He works with artists from everywhere but with a more significant focus on the ones born and/or based in the so-called Global South.
Recently he curated "Who tells a tale, adds a tail" (Denver Art Museum, 2022); Raio-que-o-parta: fictions of modern in Brazil (SESC 24 de Maio, São Paulo, 2022), Sweat (Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2021) and To-and-fro (Centro Cultural Bank of Brazil, São Paulo, Brazil, 2019).
Stefanie Hessler
Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, and the Director of Swiss Institute (SI) in New York. Her work centers artists and ideas through new commissions, transdisciplinary collaborations, and experimental formats, often with a focus on ecologies, technologies, and the aim to promote lasting change. At SI, Hessler initiated the curatorial project Spora, which invites artists to transform the institution through “environmental institutional critique,” alongside operational steps toward climate action. She recently co-curated solo shows by Raven Chacon, Ali Cherri, and Lap-See Lam, as well as a large-scale East Village-wide exhibition titled Energies, which opened in September 2024.
Previously, as the Director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, Hessler co-led the research-based exhibitions Attention After Technology (with Art Hub, Copenhagen; State of Concept, Athens; Tropical Papers, and partners at Princeton University and the Université de Paris); Sex Ecologies, including an edited compendium (with Seed Box and MIT Press); and Unweaving the Binary Code, for which she initiated institutional collaborations for the Hannah Ryggen Triennale. Selected projects as an independent curator include the 17th MomentaBiennale, Sensing Nature, Montreal; Rising Tides/Down to Earth, Gropius Bau, Berlin; Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II, Ocean Space, Venice; the symposium Practices of Attention, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo; the 6th Athens Biennale; and Tidalectics, TBA21–Augarten, Vienna.
Hessler is the author of Prospecting Ocean (MIT Press)and has edited over a dozen volumes. She is a founding committee member of the New York chapter of the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), and forms part of the On Seeing editorial collective between the MIT Press and Brown University Library. Hessler was recently named among Apollo’s 40 under 40 and ArtReview’s Power 100.
Nora N. Khan
Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, editor, and educator. She is internationally recognized for her essays and short books, marked by a hybrid, genre-defiant prose style. Formally, this work attempts to both theorize the limits of algorithmic knowledge and outline the future of creative production in a technocratic age. Her notable essay Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence, published and reprinted in ten languages since 2015, used critique, fiction, and metaphor as strategy in contending with technological evolution. For 15 years, her writing has focused on artists’ most trenchant ideas, models of experimentation across creative fields, and critique of technological design. In particular, her work on philosophy of AI/ML, with a focus on ‘incomputable’ knowledge and the relationship of language to computation, is referenced heavily by writers, theorists, artists, and practitioners across fields.
Her book Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail, 2019) focused on machine vision and generative image production. With Steven Warwick, she wrote Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information, 2017), on online conspiracy theories and fan forum culture. Forthcoming are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries), The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole), and a memoir about criticism through Strange Attractor Press. She has written features and essays on Tony Conrad, Lillian Schwartz, Josh Kline, Sondra Perry, Ian Cheng, Kevin Beasley, Meriem Bennani, Casey Reas, and on in 4Columns, Rhizome, Village Voice, Flash Art, and books for Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Gallery, Centre Pompidou, and Swiss Institute. Her writing has been supported by a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation, the Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and residencies at La Becque, Eyebeam, and Fogo Island Arts.
Khan’s practice extends to a large range of long-term collaborations and ‘public epistolary’ conversations with musicians, artists, theorists, and performers. Early work with musicians on PAN - including Steven Warwick, Lars TCF Holdhus, and label founder Bill Kouligas - created a foundation. She co-wrote essays with theorist, musician, and critic DeForrest Brown, Jr. from 2014 to 2018. She created: a libretto for Kouligas’ 2018 opera Decession with Spiros Hadjidjanos and sung by Pan Daijing at Volksbuhne Berlin; a virtual influencer with Sam Rolfes/Team Rolfes for Unsound Festival, and has ghostwritten many performance scripts. Her 2018 collaboration A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN with Sondra Perry, Caitlin Cherry, and American Artist resulted in a tiny house, a garden, a film, and a library at Performance Space, New York.
Khan is sought out for her work with artists developing experimental, demanding projects. She was the Co-Curator with Andrea Bellini of the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2024, A Cosmic Movie Camera, hosted by Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. The edition was the highest-attended in the biennale’s history, and featured all new commissions by Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, American Artist, Interspecifics, Alfatih, Shuang Li, Diego Marcon, Lawrence Lek, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Sheila Chukwulozie, Emmanuel van der Auwera, Formafantasma, Aziz Hazara, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sahej Rahal, and Jenna Sutela. As curator of Manual Override at The Shed in New York City in 2020, she worked with Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, and Lynn Hershman Leeson on new commissions, in an exhibition that featured major works by Simon Fujiwara and Martine Syms. Manual Override saw 30,000 visitors in 2 months.
Khan’s practice extends on to teaching, mentorship, public speaking, and continual development of para-institutional learning spaces around the world. Khan was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching at Rhode Island School of Design, where she was a professor in Digital + Media from 2018 to 2021. With Maya Indira Ganesh she created AI Anarchies, “Experiments in Study, Collective Learning and Unlearning,” a school, a conference, and a gathering over a week in Berlin at Akademie der Künste around the concept of an ‘anarchic AI.’ Speakers included Heba Amin, Laura Forlano, Jackie Wang, Johanna Hedva, and Hito Steyerl, and gathered fellows from all over the world for a rich seven days of debate and workshops. She was a longtime editor (2014-2021) at Rhizome, served as guest editor of HOLO, producing the well-received Mirror Stage; Between Computability and its Opposite (2021), and as Editor-in-Residence at Topical Cream, commissioning essays by writers like Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mandy Harris Williams, Johanna Hedva, and Anaïs Duplan under the frame ‘Experimental Models’.
Wanda Nanibush
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe Independent curator, image and word warrior, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation, Canada. Based in Toronto, Nanibush is the founding director of aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of Indigenous curators, writers and artists that last took place at Venice Biennale. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book Moving the Museum which chronicles some of her groundbreaking work at the Art Gallery of Ontario as the Inaugural curator of Indigenous Art.
She has curated survey, group, and retrospective exhibitions including: Robert Houle Red is Beautiful (NMAI, Smithsonian, Washington); Rebecca Belmore, Facing the Monumental (2019), (Canada and the U.S) and Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971 - 1989 (AGO).
She received her M.A. in Visual Studies from University of Toronto where she has also taught graduate courses. She will be the Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY in the Graduate Department of Art History in 2025. Nanibush has published widely on Indigenous art, politics, history, feminism and sexuality.
