Mara-Johanna Kölmel

Born in Karlsruhe/Germany in 1989.

Mara Johanna Kölmel is a London-based curator and art historian with a special interest in (post-)digital art and culture. She has performed international curatorial roles for the Biennale of Sydney/Australia and Kunsthalle Hamburg/Germany, also realizing exhibitions at Somerset House and The Silver Building in London/UK with the curatorial collective Approved by Pablo.

Mara obtained her MA in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (2013–2014). She holds a BA in cultural studies (2009–2013) from Leuphana University Lüneburg/Germany, where she is currently completing her PhD on Sculpture in the Augmented Field (2015 –). Her research examines how digital technologies configure our understanding of sculpture and the sculptural act.

She is a founding member of the artistic collective Dori O., the UCL-based research group Data Power: Activisms/Appropriations/Aesthetics and the digital culture institution Kara Agora, funded by the Culture of Solidarity Fund. These initiatives unite international scholars, curators, activists and practitioners to explore the digital sphere as a site for methodological experimentation, social activism and artistic intervention.

Mara’s writings have appeared in Art Bulletin, Texte zur Kunst, and Die Nadel. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Dada Data. Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics (2021) for Bloomsbury, co-organizer of the symposium The Sculptural in the (Post-)Digital Age (2021) at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI) in Munich/Germany, and co-founder of SALOON London, a network for women in the London art world.