Bassam el Baroni is a curator and art critic from Alexandria, Egypt. He is the co-founder and director of Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), a collectively run, non-profit art space which has been in operation since December 2005.Baroni’s recent curatorial projects include You, Me and the Trajectories of a Post-Everything Era at PROGR Bern, Switzerland and ACAF 2005-2006; Cleotronica 08, Alexandria’s first international media art festival, 2008;Trapped in Amber: Angst for a Re-enacted Decade, co-curated with Helga-Marie Nordby at UKS, Oslo, Norway in 2009; and A.K.A. Education, which took place in Alexandria in 2009.
Baroni is the curator of ACAF’s contribution to Manifesta 8along with Associate Curator Jeremy Beaudry. Manifesta 8will be collaboratively curated by ACAF together with the Chamber of Public Secrets and Tranzit.org, and will open in Murcia, Spain in October this year.Alongside his curatorial projects, Baroni has most recently turned his attention to developing and performing a series of dramatised lectures entitled FOXP2, the latest in the series being FOXP2 New York in which he delivered his text to the sound of musical beats generated by the New York based beat-boxer Kenny Muhammad.