Eszter Szakács is a curator and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice engages with group-based forms of organizing and curating, with the aim of connecting people and initiatives on a longer-term basis. She has been involved in several collaboratively curated biennials and grassroots projects, including as Curator of the Guest Programme of the 41st EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, together with the EVA Team (2025); as a curatorial team member of the second (2017) and third (2021) editions of OFF-Biennale Budapest and of OFF-Biennale’s participation in documenta fifteen as a lumbung member (2022). Her practice-based research focuses on grassroots art organizing. She is a member of the IMAGINART research group as a PhD candidate at ASCA of the University of Amsterdam and a Tutorial Collective member of the Lumbung Practice temporary master’s at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, made in collaboration with de Appel’s Curatorial Programme and Gudskul’s Collective Study Programme in Jakarta.
Between October 2025 and March 2026, Szakács served as Interim Artistic Director of de Appel in Amsterdam, where she previously curated the exhibition Dóra Maurer – SUMUS – We Are Together (2023). With Naeem Mohaiemen, she co-edited Solidarity Must Be Defended, an anthology of visual arts projects exploring solidarity, realized and failed, during the Cold War. From 2011 to 2020, she worked as a curator and editor at tranzit.hu in Budapest, where she curated the Budapest premiere of Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2018), co-edited the online international journal Mezosfera (2016–2020), and edited the collaborative Curatorial Dictionary (2012–2018), featured in ICI’s traveling exhibition Publishing Against the Grain (2017–2023). She was also a participating curator in ICI’s exhibition Notes for Tomorrow (from 2021).
