Professor Tessa Giblin is the Director of Talbot Rice Gallery and holds a Personal Chair in Contemporary Curating with Edinburgh College of Art. Tessa has worked as a curator for 20 years – in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Ireland and now Scotland. As Director of Talbot Rice Gallery she leads the team as well as curating exhibitions that engage with issues being debated as part of the national conversation, including The Recent (expanding our imaginations – and responsibilities – into geological time), The Normal (reflecting on the impact of the pandemic), Borderlines (art in the age of Brexit), At the Gates (on women and power). These projects champion art and exhibitions as platforms for complex histories and debates, pushing back against polarisation. Students from all subject areas within ECA engage with Talbot Rice Gallery as part of their university experience, with Tessa and other gallery staff regularly teaching into various programmes or holding workshops on specific themes.

She has also initiated a series of solo exhibitions of artists who also ‘mine the museum’, bringing items out of the University’s heritage collections that respond to their practices - Angelica Mesiti, Samson Young, Celine Condorelli, Lucy Skaer and soon with Wael Shawky. Other major solo exhibitions and commissioned works have included El Anatsui, Emeka Ogboh and Qiu Zhijie.

From 2006-16 she was Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre in Dublin where she made commissioning new work a hallmark of the visual arts programme, with artists including Mario Garcia Torres, Núria Güell, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Barbara Bloom, David Claerbout, Eva Kotatkova & Dominik Lang, Jennifer Tee, Mikala Dwyer, Forerunner, Geoffrey Farmer, Jeremy Millar, Ceal Floyer, Sung Hwan Kim & David Michael DiGregorio, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Seamus Nolan, James Coleman and Aurélien Froment. Within the busy multidisciplinary arts centre she also developed group exhibitions that used the apparatus of theatre to create durational exhibitions. These included Conjuring for Beginners and Riddle of the Burial Grounds, which was the first in a series of exhibitions that considered art in relation to the Anthropocene and nuclear waste burial. She also created exhibitions engaging with Ireland’s debt crisis: Prehistory of the Crisis I & II, and exhibitions focussed on the mysteries of art, exhibitions and knowledge, including Nonknowledge, Blackboxing, Every Version Belongs to the Myth (co-curated with Amalia Pica) and Exhibitions.

In 2015 she was guest curator of the steirischer herbst festival exhibition in Graz, Austria, where she curated Hall of Half-Life over four venues. She was also Commissioner and Curator of Ireland at La Biennale di Venezia in 2017 with the artist Jesse Jones, an exhibition that later toured to Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao, SAMSTAG / Adelaide Festival, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and was the subject of an Impact Case Study for REF 2021.

She has been a judge for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Visual Arts, selection committee for Scotland+Venice, and part of the acquisitions committee for the Frac Bretagne 2020-22. While in Dublin, she contributed to teaching on various programmes, including being curatorial seminar leader of the MA in Visual Arts Practices, IADT from 2007 – 09, and co-created the Visual Arts Workers Forum. She took part in De Appel’s curatorial training programme in 2005/06 as the last intake of Saskia Bos, and was subsequently appointed Head of Exhibitions of Smart Project Space, Amsterdam. Before moving to Europe, she was Assistant Curator of Artspace, Auckland, and is originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she received a BFA (Painting) from University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, and emerged as a curator through the network of artist-run spaces across Aotearoa.

With a 19th century former natural history museum and a contemporary white cube to fuel its engine, Talbot Rice Gallery is exploring what the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art can contribute to contemporary art production today.