The AIR-M Ebenböckhaus Residency 2026 hosts one curator from Northern Brazil from August 25th to September 24th.
Ariana Nuala was nominated by Pivô Salvador, recommended by the Salta art jury, and appointed by the Department of Arts and Culture of the City of Munich to participate in the AIR-M Ebenböckhaus Residency 2026 in Munich as curator-in-residence.
Ariana Nuala is a Brazilian researcher and curator whose practice unfolds through sustained dialogue with artistic collectives and institutional contexts. Their work examines museums as sites where memory, power, territory, and diaspora intersect. Combining curatorial practice with poetic writing, pedagogy, and collective processes, Nuala develops methodologies that resist institutional pacification while sustaining tension, opacity, and critical proximity.
A central strand of their research addresses the relationship between plantation histories and contemporary cultural institutions. In their MA project MATAMUSEUMATA (FORESTMUSEUMFOREST) at the Federal University of Paraíba, Nuala placed the destroyed Quilombo do Catucá in relation to Oficina Francisco Brennand — a museum built on former plantation land. This inquiry examined how colonial inheritances continue to shape epistemologies, spatial politics, and forms of representation. Drawing on the notion of the “unpayable debt” of colonial modernity, Nuala proposes feitiço (spell-casting) as a curatorial method of insubordination operating across writing, exhibition-making, and institutional practice.
Through exhibitions, residencies, and public programs, they explore epistemic shifts within museums, seeking to realign institutional narratives with Black and Indigenous histories and diasporic cosmologies. Their work engages curatorial fabulation, interspecies relations, sonorities, and embodied gestures to challenge hegemonic knowledge structures and reposition the museum as a space of active negotiation.
Nuala holds a Master’s degree in Art History from the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB) and a degree in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), with academic experiences at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and CLACSO.
From 2023 to 2024, they were Head of Education and Research at Oficina Francisco Brennand, where they previously worked as a curator (2021–2023). They coordinated the education department of Museu Murillo La Greca (2018–2020) and worked as a curator and researcher at Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo in 2025. They were assistant curator of Arquivo Afro Fotográfico Zumví at Instituto Moreira Salles, curated by Hélio Menezes, and adjunct curator of the 38th Panorama of Brazilian Art (2024). In 2025, they were resident at the Institute for Postnatural Studies. Their critical texts have been published by institutions including the 36th São Paulo Biennial and Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
About the Residency
The AIR-M Ebenböckhaus Residency is part of the Artist-in-Residence Munich (AIR-M) program organized by the Department of Arts and Culture of the City of Munich. The curator residency is realized in collaboration with Salta art and Pivô Salvador.
The one-month residency (August 25th – September 24th, 2026) offers time and space for research, exchange, and engagement with Munich’s cultural landscape. The curator lives and works at Ebenböckhaus in Munich-Pasing, alongside two South American artists participating in the concurrent artist residency program, fostering dialogue and collaboration.
Accommodation and a monthly stipend are funded by the Department of Arts and Culture of the City of Munich. Pivô Salvador covers the return flight from Brazil and provides a research-trip allowance. Salta art facilitates access to events and professional networks connected to the residency. The program includes studio visits, institutional encounters, and opportunities for public exchange, creating a framework for sustained dialogue between South America and Munich’s art scene.