João Laia is the Artistic Director of the Contemporary Art Department of the Municipality of Porto, Portugal. From 2019 to 2024 he was Chief Curator at Kiasma—National Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Laia curated forms of the surrounding futures the 12th edition of GIBCA—Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2023) and together with Valentinas Klimašauskas co-curated the 14th edition of the Baltic Triennial, The Endless Frontier, at the CAC—Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius (2021). Laia and Klimašauskas curated the artist duo Pakui Hardware for the Lithuanian National Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.
Previous projects include collaborations with in institutions such as Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; MACBA—Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; MAAT—Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; Moscow Young Art Biennial, MMOMA, Moscow; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Contemporary Art Biennial SescVideobrasil, São Paulo, presenting projects such as MASKS (2020), In Free Fall (2019), Vanishing Point (2019), Drowning in a sea of Data (2019), foreign bodies (2018), 10000 Years Later Between Venus and Mars (2017-18), H Y P E R C O N N E C T E D (2016) or Hybridize or Disappear (2015).
Laia has a background in social sciences, film theory and contemporary art. Among other publications, he edited Surface Disorder (GMP/Mousse 2024), Living Encounters (Kiasma/Mousse 2022), A Multiple Community (Sesc 2018), co-edited Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s monograph Spiral Forest (Mousse 2018) and published in magazines such as Art Monthly, Flash Art, frieze, Mousse, Spike and Terremoto.
