Els Silvrants-Barclay

Els Silvrants-Barclay is a curator and researcher, focusing on what art can be and do when activated outside of its own institutions, and brought in relation to cities, landscapes, spaces, and their politics. In 2025, she is the lead curator for 'The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet', a series of artistic actions in the post-industrial landscape of Buda, on the outskirts of Brussels. She is associate researcher at the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies (VUB) and vice-president of BOZAR. Till the end of 2024, she was a lecturer and senior researcher at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zürich, where she founded the Dept. of the Ongoing. Till 2019 she co-directed Netwerk Aalst in Belgium (now NW) leading the contemporary art centre through an intensive transition. Previously she was in charge of Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders, a collaboration between the four main contemporary art museums in Flanders (Belgium) on contemporary collecting. She coordinated the Advanced Master in Theatre Studies, lectured dance theory and was part of the Research Centre for Visual Poetics at the University of Antwerp. Before she lived in Beijing (China) where she founded the Institute for Provocation, a workspace for artists and architects, and worked as curator and coordinator for different festivals and cultural institutions.