The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) inaugurated its new international residency program, the NTMoFA International Residency, with the Researcher Meet & Greet, introducing Italian curator and art historian Giulia Colletti as the program’s first resident researcher. Selected from a pool of 183 applicants representing 53 countries, Colletti is in residence at NTMoFA from September 20 to October 20, 2025, developing her project Subsurface Resistance: Feminist Legacies and Technological Imaginaries in (Post-)Industrial Taiwan.
NTMoFA stated that the International Residency is the museum’s first research-oriented program, inviting artists, curators, critics, and art historians to undertake research based on the museum collection, Taiwanese art history, and media art. Through public programs, the residency aims to share new knowledge with society. Since its announcement, the program has already gained wide international attention.
Colletti’s residency offers a critical opportunity to examine how modern and contemporary artists respond to infrastructural landscapes shaped by technology and to address the polycrisis rooted in twentieth-century industrialisation. Her research at NTMoFA examines the residual traces of industrial legacies, particularly the overlooked role of women in Taiwan’s mining history, and explores how extractive systems continue to reshape both environmental conditions and modes of social organisation.
During the Meet & Greet on September 26, Colletti shared her curatorial rationale, situating Taiwan’s Haishan Coal Mine and the experiences of female miners within global narratives of subterranean labour and technological epistemologies. She emphasised the importance of connecting Taiwan’s local histories with transnational dialogues, extending her prior research at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Korea, and linking it to her co-curatorial work on The Vast Automaton, the 5th Industrial Art Biennial (IAB) in Croatia, supported by the 13th Italian Council.
As part of her residency, Colletti will host two additional public programs: a Film Screening & Discussion on October 8, exploring how Taiwanese contemporary artists respond to industrialisation and technological imaginaries; and a Symposium on October 18, where she will share her interim findings and reflect on Taiwan’s cultural and environmental histories from a comparative, transnational perspective.
NTMoFA Director Chen Kuang-Yi remarked: “To reframe and reconstruct Taiwanese Art History, we must bring in international perspectives. Through the NTMoFA International Residency, we aim to situate Taiwan within the global discourse of art history, while at the same time deepening interpretations of our own collection.”
With this launch, NTMoFA establishes the first research-driven international residency hosted by a national art museum in Taiwan. It provides fellows with access to the museum’s collection of over 20,000 works, library resources, and research networks, fostering knowledge exchange with local scholars and artists.
About the Residency Researcher
Giulia Colletti is a curator and art historian. Her research traces the emergence of mega-structural landscapes shaped by mining territories and computational systems. Informed by cosmotechnics in Southern and Southeastern Europe and East Asia, she examines the reverberations of technological epistemic regimes. Engaging with artists who probe extractive paradigms, the erosion of living matter, and speculative futures, her work explores how biosphere–technosphere entanglements reshape modes of world-making. She is the Co-curator of the 5th Industrial Art Biennial. From 2019 to 2025, she served as Curator of Programs and Digital at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea.
She lectures on Contemporary Art at ABADIR Academy of Design and Visual Communication, where she is also Scientific Coordinator of the international programme Bodies of Water. She was the Inaugural Curatorial Fellow 2019 at The Glasgow School of Art and has given lectures in academic contexts such as Columbia University (CAMS), Kingston University, University of Cape Town, and University of Glasgow, among others.
For more information:
Project Coordinator: Huang Chuan-yu Tel: 886-4-2372-3552 ext. 121 chuan@art.ntmofa.gov.tw
Media Contact: May Yan Tel: 886-4-2372-3552 ext. 123