IBA Stage: GIBCA 2025 – Ioana Leca
GIBCA Director Ioana Leca. Courtesy GIBCA
IBA Stage: Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA) 2025
November 28, 2025 (Friday)
3:00 pm (Göteborg/GMT+1)
https://www.gibca.se/en/
We are pleased to welcome Ioana Leca, Artistic Director of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), as one of the invited speakers for the upcoming IBA Stage on November 28, 2025.
Since her appointment in 2017, Ioana Leca has played a defining role in shaping GIBCA into one of the most critically engaged biennials in Scandinavia. Across five editions of the biennial, from 2017 through 2025, Leca has worked in close collaboration with curators including Nav Haq, Lisa Rosendahl, João Laia, and now Christina Lehnert, helping to articulate a long-term vision for the biennial grounded in political engagement, rooted in the local context, and delivered with a sound ethical framework.
Beyond the exhibition format, she has initiated public programmes focused on remembrance and memorialization, exploring how art intersects with collective memory and civic space. Her practice includes also an interest in publishing, including her contribution to the volume Biennials as Sites of Historical Narration (Mousse Publishing, 2022), where she reflects on the role biennials can play in reframing dominant historical narratives.
Leca’s background bridges curating, cultural strategy, and institutional development. Before joining GIBCA, she served as Director of NAU Gallery and Programmer at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Stockholm. She also co-founded the nomadic curatorial platform Konstkontoret together with Hanna Lundborg, an initiative committed to testing formats of curatorial mobility and collaboration across disciplines.
Through these various roles, she has consistently advocated for collaborative, dialogic, and locally anchored approaches to curating, while keeping a sharp focus on broader cultural infrastructures and the long-term sustainability of artistic practices.
We invite you to join us on November 28 at 3PM CET as we reflect on how a hand that is all our hands combined finds its place within Göteborg, its communities and the wider biennial world
To have the possibility to hear and discuss with the individuals behind biennials has been a key component of what we believe IBA can offer to our members and the wider public and we value your participation through our live streams. As always IBA Stage events are meant as a moment to hear about a project through its makers and have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session at the end of the presentation.
