Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand at the 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, in France

Ten artists from Aotearoa will participate in the 18^th Lyon Biennale, opening at multiple venues across the city of Lyon on 19 September 2026.

Fiona Clark, Ngahina Hohaia (Taranaki Iwi, Te Atiawa, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Mutunga, Parihaka), Rangi Kipa (Te Āti Awa,Taranaki, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Tama), Maureen Lander (Ngāpuhi, Te Hikutū), Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky M’Baye, John Miller (Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Tawake ki te Tuawhenua, Te Uritaniwha, Ngāti Rēhia, Te Whiu),, Sriwhana Spong, Michael Stevenson, Ashleigh Taupaki (Ngāti Hako, Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāti Kahungunu) and Luke Willis Thompson will each present works in the Biennale following research visits by Artistic Director Isabelle Bertollotti and Curator Catherine Nichols to Aotearoa in May 2025 and February 2026.

About the 18th Lyon Biennale

Titling the exhibition To pass from one dream to another, Australian-born, Berlin-based curator, Catherine Nichols has chosen to centre this exhibition on the notion of economy — not in the conventional sense, but as articulated by French artist Robert Filliou: a “poetic economy” that intertwines art with life. Rarely explored from this angle, it proves profoundly revealing of our world’s state. Viewed through the lens of exchanges and relationships, it probes the ripple effects on local and global ecosystems.

As part of this, the 2026 edition of the Biennale will devote special attention to Oceania – conceived not as a mere spotlight, but as a space of relation and movement.

Artists from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region bring practices rooted in histories of colonialism, extraction and circulation, as well as contested sovereignties. Their works probe the economies underpinning these narratives, their value systems, the intergenerational responsibilities they entail, and the modes of transmission they enable, resonating with Lyon’s own material and political realities. This dialogue does not simply expand the frame, but shifts its coordinates, revealing other ways of inhabiting the world and imagining interdependencies.

The Lyon Biennale has been a leading contemporary art event, supporting the creation and presentation of new and existing works, since its inception in 1991. Each Biennale attracts almost 300,000 visitors including 9,000 arts professionals and media from around the world.  

Read Catherine Nichols full introduction to the artistic project here.

For a full list of artists currently confirmed to participate, and more about the Biennale, click here.

Introducing the artists and their work for the Lyon Biennale

‍

Fiona Clark

Born in 1954 in Inglewood, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Lives and works in Tikorangi, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Fiona Clark’s photographic practice is rooted in long-term relationships grounded in collaboration and care. Her images attend to communities and environments often excluded from mainstream visibility, tracing lives, histories and forms of belonging across different contexts. Through a documentary approach, she considers how bodies, lands and identities are shaped within wider systems of value. Her photographs examine the effects of extractive economies on everyday life, while remaining closely connected to community histories, activism and the cultural memory of marginalised groups in Aotearoa New Zealand. She will show two separate presentations at the Lyon Biennale.

1 - For more than fifty years, Fiona Clark has documented the communities of which she forms part. Here, that community extends beyond people to the plants and animals with whom she shares the land. The Polaroids presented here record rabbits, possums, feral cats and other introduced animals trapped and shot on her property in Taranaki, Aotearoa NewZealand, as part of Clark’s long-term efforts to regenerate indigenous ecosystems. Each image is annotated with the place, date and circumstances of the animal’s death, giving the archive the precision of a field record. In the neighbouring vitrine are soft toys drawn from the many collections Clark has assembled in the former dairy factory where she lives and works. Among them is the rabbit apron she wore as a child, kept as part of the vast collections of teapots, crockery, magazines, hairdryers and other everyday objects she has assembled over a lifetime.

2 - Cosmetic Women was Clark’s first colour series. Shot in mid-1970s Auckland shopping arcades and department stores, it captures sales assistants and the mannequins who populated these spaces. Coiffed hair, painted faces, fitted dresses, wigs and gleaming counters make the shop floor appear theatrical, yet Clark photographs it with restraint.The women meet the camera with highly trained composure, their gestures and everyday routines set alongside the mannequins’ immaculate staging. Clark was drawn to the close-knit, working-class women staffing the cosmetics counters and wig bar at George Courts, a Karangahape Road department store. Thinking back, she recalls their camaraderie and solidarity, though they did not necessarily identify as feminists. Presented here at full scale for the first time, the series affirms Clark’s conviction that working-class women overlooked by the women’s movement must be written back into history.

Fiona Clark’s presentation is made possible through the support of Creative New Zealand and Lett Thomas.

Fiona Clark is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Lett Thomas.

‍

Ngahina Hohaia (Taranaki Iwi, Te Ati Awa, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Mutunga, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Born in 1975 in Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she lives and works

Legacies of resistance and collective memory shape Ngahina Hohaia’s practice. A Māori artist from a lineage of activists, she draws on inherited knowledge systems and tools for survival to create large-scale fibre and multi-sensory installations. Her works testify as material witnesses to the persistence of colonial violence and are conceived as means to restore territories, both physical and as spaces of knowledge. They function simultaneously as memorial forms and acts of renewal.

Ngahina's installation at the Lyon Biennale, Manawa Whenua takes its title from a Māori cultural concept describing an unfailing underground spring, the source of whakapapa, the genealogical ties linking people, ancestors and place. The central imagery is of the restorative waters that flow from the artist’s ancestral mountain Taranaki, a place of profound cultural and spiritual significance for her tribes. The installation layers white feather plumes gathered from albatross, the largest of all seabirds, renowned for their ability to endure extreme conditions and traverse the expanse of oceans before returning to land to nest and nurture their young. Manawa Whenua offers a visual manifestation of a proverb for inter-generational strength and reassurance that can be found in a well-spring, as a site of continuity and resistance that will always rise despite forces that seek to suppress it.

Ngahina's presentation has been generously contributed to and supported by Ngāti Maru, Taranaki iwi, Ngā Ruahinerangi, Andrew Black, Zane Graham, Danielle Sciascia, Ngahina Wharehoka, Gillian and Paul Kendrick, Govett-Brewster Foundation, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery,  Te Papa Atawhai Department of Conservation of New Zealand and Creative New Zealand.

Ngahina Hohaia shows work in Aotearoa New Zealand with Tim Melville Gallery

‍

Rangi Kipa (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Tama)

Born in 1966, lives at Ngāpuketūrua, next to the Waiongana River in North Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand

For over 35 years, Rangi Kipa has been at the forefront of restoring Māori cultural practices and visual languages suppressed by British colonisation in New Zealand. More specifically, Rangi’s efforts manifest the cultural ambitions of his people as they transitioned through the settlement of historical grievances with the New Zealand Government. Through that fraught process, tribal leaders drew strength from Rangi’s physical realisation of ancestral spirits worn on the body, and received moko (tattoo) testifying to the battles they fought in their quest for restitution. In the post-settlement phase, Rangi is now populating his landscape with physical markers of presence and survival.

While great advancements have been made, there remains a tangled web of legislation that interferes with Māori knowledge systems, particularly in respect to the responsibilities Māori hold to the environment.

Rangi’s installation presents a range of ritual objects made from whale teeth and bone. This collection documents twenty years of practice and represents a determined effort to maintain ancient practices at the ocean foreshore.

Māori hold that stranded whales are a gift from the supreme ocean deity, Tangaroa, and reserve harvested material for the most powerful markers of leadership; a practice shared by indigenous peoples united by the Pacific Ocean. As the world’s attitudes to commercial whaling hardened in the twentieth century, Māori were prohibited from a relationship with stranded whales along the coastlines of New Zealand. Horrified by the government’s treatment of whales in the end stages of life, however, Māori fought to receive these gifts in the correct manner, which has enabled the restoration of customary signs of leadership among their community.

In 1996 Rangi was involved in a bold assertion of Māori cultural rights that challenged the New Zealand Government’s claim of ownership over a stranded whale on the coastline of his ancestral landscape through the harvest of whale material for the creation of ritual objects. Since that time, Rangi has advocated for reform to national and international legislation that inhibits the practice of ancient rites over stranded whales, which are considered by Māori and many indigenous peoples united by the Pacific Ocean, as gifts from Tangaroa, the supreme ocean deity. In these forums, Rangi has found himself grouped alongside pro-whaling lobbies, yet arguing an entirely different position; one that dutifully respects whales as chiefs of their domain, and bestows their mortal remains with the highest status in Māori cultural practices.

From the 17 - 27 September at the Biennale, Rangi will be carving whale bone and teeth at Les Grands Locos, offering visitors the opportunity to handle this precious material. Dr Lisa Renard, a French social and cultural anthropologist and museologist, will be working alongside Rangi during this period. Since 2011, Lisa has worked between Western Europe and Aotearoa New Zealand with Māori artists, museum professionals and academics working in the Māori world and beyond, including in French, Dutch and German museums. Her main goal is to support and help Tangata Whenua gain better access to taonga currently held in Europe. As a researcher, in European museums, she also advocates for greater understanding of Te Ao Māori, kaitiakitanga and knowledge practices by encouraging European museum professionals to foster relationships with Māori experts such as Rangi Kipa. 

This presentation is anchored by a suite of photographs that locate ritual objects produced from whale material within the natural environment and visualise the concepts of balance and harmony central to Māori worldviews.

Writing about this presentation Rangi says:

“Through this work, I continue practices shared by Indigenous peoples united by Moana-nui-a-Kiwa (Pacific Ocean), which have been observed for thousands of years.

 Carved from whale bone and teeth recovered from natural strandings along the shoreline of Aotearoa (New Zealand), these works honour the whale as the supreme ariki (chief) of their domain, our revered ancestor and relation, and recognise our place within the interconnected cycles of oceanic life.

 Across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, such materials have long existed within an economy of mana (prestige bestowed by others) and embody chiefly authority, whakapapa (shared ancestry), and diplomatic exchange. 

The recurring patterns and forms that define these works are not ornament alone. This visual language functions as mnemonic vessels that carry knowledge and values across generations, and connect contemporary practice to ancient understandings of identity, kinship, stewardship, and belonging.

By contributing to this practice, I seek to affirm mana as a living force that sustains cultural continuity and reinforces the enduring relationships between people, ocean, and cosmos."

Rangi's presentations at the Lyon Biennale are made possible through the support of Ngā Iwi o Taranaki, Toi Māori Aotearoa, the New Zealand Embassy to France, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai, New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, New Zealand Cultural Diplomacy International Programme, Creative New Zealand, Govett-Brewster Foundation and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Rangi Kipa shows work in Aotearoa New Zealand with Melanie Roger Gallery

‍

Maureen Lander MNZM (Ngāpuhi, Te Hikutū)

Born in 1942 in Rawene, Aotearoa New Zealand

Lives and works in Whangamata, Aotearoa New Zealand

Māori weaving techniques form the foundation of Maureen Lander’s practice, which extends across installation and spatial composition. Working in relationship with others – people and contexts – is a defining characteristic of Lander’s practice. Her work explores how relationships between material, genealogy, kinship and place are structured, remembered and carried. Attentive to the transmission of knowledge across territories and generations, her installations create spaces in which inherited practices are reactivated and sustained within the present.

Kit-Set Whanaungatanga is composed of a grid of flat-packed kete , traditional Māori woven baskets, made from harakeke (Phormium tenax) . Through this interconnected field of kit-sets , Lander explores whanaungatanga: relationships that extend beyond blood and are developed through mutual interests, collaboration and choice. Lander developed this work collaboratively with a group of weavers who each followed the same instructions for size and form while introducing their own colour and pattern variations. The result can be described as a “series of similar diversity”, drawing attention to subtle differences in technique. Its modular structure allows the composition to be assembled, disassembled, and reconfigured in different places —an approach that reflects the concept of relationships as something that we carry with us wherever we go.

With contributions from Mandy Sunlight, Makareta Jahnke, Janie Randerson, Jan Barratt, Trish (aka Tira) and the support of Creative New Zealand, Govett Brewster Foundation, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, and Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery.

Maureen Lander shows work in Aotearoa New Zealand with Tim Melville Gallery

‍

John Miller (Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Tawake ki te Tuawhenua, Te Uritaniwha, Ngāti Rēhia, Te Whiu)

Born in 1950 in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, where he lives and works.

John Miller is a Māori photographer whose work has documented Māori struggles and movements for social justice and civil rights over six decades. He has photographed some of the most significant socio-political events in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand, creating an essential archive on issues of land, sovereignty, and the environment.

Two public events, separated by almost forty years, record the continuing struggle over Māori land and sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand. John Miller’s first series documents the Māori Land March of 1975, when thousands traversed the length of the North Island to protest continuing land loss and demand that Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) be honoured. Signed in 1840 by many Māori chiefs and representatives of the British Crown, the Treaty affirms Māori sovereign rights and authority over their lands and resources, yet repeated breaches by the Crown have kept it at the centre of political struggle. His second series records commemorations marking the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Rangiriri fought in 1863 during the New Zealand Land Wars. The defeat of the Waikato tribal forces at Rangiriri by the British Army opened up the rich and productive Waikato lands to large-scale seizure and confiscation. The accompanying slide show offers insight into the ongoing nature of these struggles and the broader scope of Miller’s documentary practice.

Britain proclaimed sovereignty over Aotearoa New Zealand in 1840 and established it as a separate Crown colony the following year. Māori resistance to land seizure and the erosion of their authority over their lands has continued ever since. Photographed on Waitangi Day, 6 February 2001, John Miller’s triptych shows demonstrators holding a banner reading HONOUR THE TREATY as police stand opposite them. Waitangi Day commemorates the signing ofTe Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) in 1840 by Māori chiefs and representatives of the British Crown. Across three frames, enlarged in Lyon to billboard scale, HONOUR THE TREATY is broken into separate words. The demand, repeated by Māori year after year, calls on the Crown to honour its commitments under the Treaty and address the continuing dispossession and violence produced by its failure to uphold them.

John's presentations at the Lyon Biennale are made possible through the  support of Waipareira Trust, the New Zealand Cultural Diplomacy International Programme, Season Aotearoa, Motion Sickness, Charlotte and Christopher Swasbrook, Hamish Coney and Creative New Zealand.

John Miller is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Season Aotearoa.

‍

Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky M’Baye

Born in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

Lives and works in Paris, France.

Through moving image and installation, Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky M’Baye questions the material and immaterial conditions through which belonging is shaped and experienced. Her practice is grounded in iterative, ritualistic process of thinking through making, where research, gesture and image evolve in close relation. Drawing on genealogical and archival fragments, she constructs narratives that move between speculation and poetic form. Attentive to colonial and diasporic histories, she asks how the intercultural body navigates an inheritance that is unfixed and fragmented, and how historical complexity and cultural incompleteness might act as mediums from which critical, self-preserving narratives emerge.

Yana will present a new film developed through research in Senegal and France into the nineteenth-century trade in gum arabic. Harvested in northern Senegal and transported through colonial trade routes, gum arabic was used in Lyon's silk industry and in processes such as printing and bookbinding. The film pays particular attention to the Signares, women of African and European descent who became influential traders along the Senegalese coast and participated in the commercial networks through which goods and capital circulated. Filmed across former trading sites and contemporary landscapes, the work brings this history into contact with the present. Drawing on archival research alongside the artist's reimagining of her own family history, it follows the movement of gum arabic between Senegal and France, and the lives bound to its exchange.

‍

Sriwhana Spong

Born in 1979 in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

Lives and works in London, England

Voile-voilà is a silk work dyed with Fanta produced in the United States. Composed of stitched silk panels, it draws on the French word voile, meaning “veil” and “sail”. Suspended, the work functions as threshold and surface, dividing space while allowing passage. The bright orange of Fanta, absorbed by the silk, renders a globally recognised commodity as a translucent field of colour. Its hue comes from Yellow 6, a petroleum-derived synthetic dye entangled with histories of industrial production, imperial expansion and cultures of consumption. The stepped form charts the accrual of the artist’s New Zealand KiwiSaver pension fund over sixteen years. Mirrored across two silk curtains, the graph recalls a Candi Bentar, a Balinese split gate. Visitors pass between its two halves, moving through a financial record reframed as an architectural threshold through which ideas of value, inheritance, orientation and time are brought into relation.

Sriwhana Spong works across film, performance, and sculpture. Through observation, research, collaboration, and material experimentation, her work approaches a subject from multiple positions, allowing meaning to emerge through relation. Engaging scientific, literary, and embodied forms of knowledge, Spong transforms materials drawn from everyday life through process such as staining, dyeing, and accumulation.

Sriwhana's presentation at the Lyon Biennale is supported by Creative New Zealand and with the help of Holding Textile Hermès.

Sriwhana Spong is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Lett Thomas.

‍

Michael Stevenson

Born in 1964 in Inglewood, Aotearoa New Zealand

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Serene Velocity in Practice: MC510/CS183 brings together three classrooms linked by a walk way. It takes its title from Ernie Gehr’s 1970 film, in which a corridor appears to extend without end. Across these spaces, the work traces how ideas move from classroom to policy and from belief to governance. The first reconstructs MC510: Signs & Wonders, taught by evangelical pastor John Wimber at Fuller Theological Seminary from 1982 to 1985. In practical clinics, students learned techniques of healing and exorcism, testing whether spiritual power could be taught and passed on. The second reconstructs CS183: Startup, Peter Thiel’s 2012 Stanford course. The billionaire investor and right-wing donor cast founders as exceptional figures capable of building a future beyond democratic restraint. The third examines how economic grievance following the 2008 global financial crisis converged with evangelical plans for institutional control, tracing it through the rise of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. That evangelical ambition finds its most vivid sculptural expression in seven wineskins in varying states of collapse, invoking the biblical parable in which new wine bursts old skins as it ferments. The installation casts this promise of renewal as a threat: democratic institutions become spent vessels to be replaced by a Christian political order.

Working with archival materials, models and spatial dispositifs, Michael Stevens examines how economic, technological and ideological systems take form and circulate. With the support of Creative New Zealand.

Michael Stevenson is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Lett Thomas.

‍

Ashleigh Taupaki (Ngāti Hako, Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāti Kahungunu)

Born in 1997 in Waitākere, Aotearoa New Zealand

Lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

– Welcome

Along the path from the gates of Les Grandes Locos to the main building, a woman’s voice rings out in a karanga, a Māori ceremonial call of welcome. As the call carries across the site, synchronised gunshots sound from multiple points, retracing the approach of Ngāti Hako members summoned before a rūnanga, or pan-tribal council, in 1879. They fired into the air to announce their arrival and their refusal to disown the shooting of a government surveyor who had entered their Hauraki land despite repeated warnings. The survey would have prepared the land for subdivision and sale. Ngāti Hako is Taupaki’s iwi, or tribal community. Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Māori-language agreement signed in 1840 by Māori chiefs and representatives of the British Crown, affirmed Māori authority and self-determination, yet Britain proclaimed sovereignty that same year. Māori resistance to land seizure and colonial encroachment has continued ever since.

– Tree

Kahikatea is Aotearoa New Zealand’s tallest indigenous tree. Its scientific name, Dacrycarpus Dacrydioides, invokes systems of classification through which forests were rendered measurable and available for economic exploitation. Taupaki lays out sixty sections of timber, each one metre long, in the form of a fallen kahikatea. Extending sixty metres, the sculpture matches the full height the tree can reach – roughly that of a twenty-storey building. In 1769, James Cook measured a kahikatea in Hauraki, Taupaki’s ancestral land, and assessed its value as timber. Such measurements formed part of voyages that mapped coasts, asserted British territorial claims and identified resources for extraction across the Pacific. Kahikatea were felled and removed from Māori land; although the timber proved unsuitable for long voyages, extensive forests were later cleared. The sculpture gives scale to Taupaki’s dream of kahikatea standing again in Hauraki and links their return to the recovery of Māori land and cultural relationships damaged by colonisation.

Taupaki examines relationships to whenua (land) through installation, drawing and research. Working with minimalism and text, she addresses histories of extraction and dispossession while reasserting the authority of whānau (family), hapū (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe). Her work is grounded in specific sites and archival records, where material and narrative remain closely linked. Extending beyond documentation, she proposes forms that measure loss and register absence, opening questions around restitution, responsibility and the long temporalities of land.

Ashleigh Taupaki's presentation at the Lyon Biennale is supported by Creative New Zealand and the artist would like to acknowledge LOT23 MEDIA, Waiuku Pistol Club, Te Kupenga 0 Ngāti Hako and Jack Chen.

‍

Luke Willis Thompson

Born in 1988 in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, where he lives and works

Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Trilogy (2024-2026)

Through moving image, performance and installation, Luke Willis Thompson interrogates the politics of representation and the legacies of colonialism. His films employ restrained formal strategies that operate as counter-images, foregrounding absence, silence and refusal. Drawing on the visual codes of broadcast media and political communication, his practice challenges dominant regimes of visibility.

While Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa is the Māori name for the Pacific Ocean, the usage of the term has a political history associated with reconceptualising Oceania as a connected whole rather than separate Small Island States. Through a trilogy of films Thompson presents state broadcasts from the near future, where indigenous governments have come to power.

The first film Whakamoemoeā envisions New Zealand achieving constitutional transformation and formally becoming a Māori plurinational state. The second film Soro revisits New Zealand’s 2021 state apology for the Dawn Raids, a period of anti-immigration fervor and state-sanctioned police violence towards Pacific migrants in the 1970s. It presents a subsequent apology with a more capacious set of reparations, including unrestricted Pacific mobility, from a Prime Minister who is himself the son of a victim. The final film in the trilogy brings us to present day New Caledonia, where members of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front express their demands for independence from France directly to the audience of the Lyon Biennale.

Whakamoemoeā was commissioned by Megan Tamati-Quennell for the Sharjah Art Foundation and produced by Ordinary Films and Kura Productions. Soro was commissioned by Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery with support from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s Niu Dawn Initiative, administered by Creative New Zealand, as well as the Gow Family Foundation, and Kodak Ltd. Courtesy of the artist, Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne/Berlin. The final film installment, developed for La Biennale de Lyon, has been generously supported by The Wapping Project, with additional funding from Creative New Zealand and the Gow Family Foundation. Studio Luke WillisThomson acknowledges the support of the Office for Contemporary Art Aotearoa and Optoma.

Luke Willis Thompson is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Coastal Signs.

‍

Introducing Catherine Nichols, Curator 18th Lyon Biennale

Catherine Nichols‍

Catherine Nichols is an arts and literary scholar, curator and writer, whose work spans contemporary art, cultural history, and interdisciplinary research. Known for her ability to weave compelling narratives through exhibitions and cultural projects, Nichols has consistently explored art's potential to address complex social, political and environmental issues while fostering space for thought and conviviality.

Originally from Australia and based in Berlin, she has directed numerous major exhibitions and long term projects across Europe. In 2022, Catherine served as curator for the European Nomadic Biennale Manifesta 14 Prishtina, titled It matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise, spanning 25 sites that examined the transformative power of storytelling. From 2019 to 2021 she co-led Beuys 2021: 100 Jahre Joseph Beuys, a critical enquiry into the legacy of German artist Joseph Beuys, alongside Eugen Blume.

Catherine is currently a curator at Hamburger Bahnhof - Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin. Her recent projects include Petrit Halilaj - An Opera Out of Time (2025/2026), Delcy Morelos - Madre (2025), Alexandra Pirici - Attune (2024) and Joseph Beuys - Werke aus der Sammlung der Nationalgalerie (2024).

From October 2026 Catherine will co-lead Manifesta, with Emilia van Lynden recently appointed as General Director and Catherine  as Artistic Director.

In 2026, Frieze magazine named Catherine one of the six curators to watch.