John Zeppetelli and Hans Ibelings. Courtesy Anozero – Bienal de Coimbra.
IBA Stage: Anozero’26 — To hold, to give, to receive
September 3, 2026 | 4:00 PM Coimbra Time (GMT+1)
Online via Zoom
Ahead of our next IBA Stage, dedicated to Anozero’26 To hold, to give, to receive, we are pleased to introduce the two curators Hans Ibelings and John Zeppetelli who will join us together with Carlos Antunes and Daniel Madeira.
Joining us on September 3 at 4:00 PM Coimbra (GMT+1), Hans and John will reflect on the curatorial thinking behind Anozero’26 and on the way the exhibition developed through questions of reciprocity, mutual aid, hospitality, architecture, and collective inhabitation.
Their collaboration brings together two distinct trajectories across architecture and contemporary art. Hans Ibelings has worked extensively as an architectural historian, critic, publisher, educator, and curator, while John Zeppetelli’s practice has developed through contemporary art institutions, moving image, performance, and large-scale exhibition making. Their combined perspectives are particularly resonant with an edition of Anozero that deliberately moved across disciplinary boundaries and approached the exhibition as a relational environment rather than a fixed container for individual works.
Hans Ibelings teaches at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto and is the editor and publisher of The Architecture Observer and Maas Lawrence, together with Nanne de Ru. Prior to moving to Canada in 2012, he was editor and publisher of the Amsterdam-based magazine A10 new European architecture, which he founded in 2004 with graphic designer Arjan Groot.
Hans studied art history at the University of Amsterdam and obtained his PhD from the University of Coimbra in 2019. He has curated architectural exhibitions since 1989 and is the author of several books, including Modern Architecture: A Planetary Warming History (2023), European Architecture since 1890 (2011), and Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization (1998), alongside numerous monographs on contemporary architects.
His current book project, provisionally titled ABC: Anything But Canonized, proposes a history without hierarchy of structures, built and destroyed environments, and landscapes shaped through both human intervention and neglect. This ongoing interest in how environments are produced, altered, inhabited, and remembered offers an important lens through which to approach the spatial and architectural dimensions of Anozero’26.
John Zeppetelli, based in Montreal, was the Carol and Morton Rapp Curator, Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Before joining the AGO in 2024, he served for more than a decade as Director of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, where he led the institution and curated numerous exhibitions. He previously held curatorial positions at the Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal and at the ICA in London.
His curatorial projects include Re-enactments (2008), Chronicles of a Disappearance (2012), Ragnar Kjartansson (2016), Mundos, Teresa Margolles (2017), Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything (2017), Terror Contagion, Forensic Architecture with Laura Poitras (2021), and Phase Shifting Index, Jeremy Shaw (2023).
Alongside his institutional and curatorial work, John has curated media arts festivals in Canada and Europe and taught Video Art at NSCAD University and Concordia University. He is also an award-winning filmmaker whose work has been exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries.
For Anozero’26, these different backgrounds came together around the curatorial proposition To hold, to give, to receive. Taking the Proto-Indo-European root ghabh as a point of departure, the edition explored ideas of generosity, reciprocity, interdependence, and mutual aid while asking how an exhibition might itself become a space of exchange.
The exhibition also challenged conventional distinctions between disciplines, bringing together art, architecture, design, craft, landscape, folklore, and other forms of cultural practice. Within this framework, the histories and architecture of Coimbra became active participants in the exhibition, with the Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova and other sites across the city functioning not simply as venues but as environments through which the works could be encountered and understood. We are honored to have Hans and John present as this will give us an opportunity to discuss how this curatorial framework emerged and how their different perspectives shaped the edition.
Join us online on September 3 at 4:00 PM Coimbra time (GMT+1) for the next IBA Stage.
