Saskia van Stein (1969) currently works as curator/ programmer at NAiM/ Bureau Europa in Maastricht, The Netherlands. After studying Fine Arts, van Stein became a curator at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam, in 2002. The NAI is a large cultural institute and architecture museum with an extensive program of exhibitions, public lectures and debates. Van Stein has curated over 30 exhibitions including the recent ‘Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas’ in the Dutch Pavilion at the Architecture Biannual 2010 in Venice, in collaboration with Rietveld Landscape. She initiated the one-man gallery NEST, where artist and architects show autonomous works on (inter)presentations of urbanity and has been a professor at the FORUM department (kompas) at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. Furthermore, she is actively engaged in debates on art, architecture and design in the Netherlands. Since January 2011 Saskia van Stein is head the Source Programme.

Van Stein says: “Being interested in the broad force field shaping our surroundings, I seek to understand my contemporary cultural practice as an intricate relational complex of social, political, economical, psychological and cultural phenomena. Within that framework I’m an omnivore. When it comes to visual culture, my interest and curiosity range from formal aspects and the (historic) narrative encapsulated in urban fabric,[click] to the scenography of videoclips, from socio-economic strategies connecting top-down with bottom-up, to what it takes to make a house a home. Focusing on the praxis of culture-making from the material perspective as well as the symbolic, the relational and the representative meaning of the context we live in.

Working in the field of cultural production, I’m concerned with the ethics of (re)presentation, enhancing and empowering the community, ameliorating and mediating the visibility, performativity and influence in the fields of design, art and architecture are at the core of my professional and personal life."

http://www.bureau-europa.nl