The jury in 2025:
Mary Conlon
Mary Conlon is the Director of the Dock Arts Centre in Leitrim, Ireland. She was the founding Director of Ormston House (est. 2011) in Limerick, Ireland. She sits on the Board of Pallas Projects and Studios in Dublin, and is the co-chair of the Cultural Transformation Movement at Trans Europe Halles, an international network of 160+ arts and cultural centres.
Selected curatorial projects include Tilt by Noémie Goudal (2025) and A Record of Tenderness by Richard Malone (2024, The Dock, co-curated with Linda Shevlin); River Residencies (2020-2023, co-curated with Caimin Walsh in partnership with the local authorities in Cavan, Clare, Limerick and Tipperary in Ireland); Rehearsing Hospitalities (2022, Theatre Academy Helsinki, co-curated with Steve Maher, in partnership with Pixelache and Frame Contemporary Art Finland); Women of Limerick (2021), a new mobile phone app with National Heritage Hero, Sharon Slater; The Lore of Water (2019); The Museum of Mythological Water Beasts (2017, 2018, Ormston House, co-curated with Niamh Brown); Le Moment Fabriqué by Alan Butler (2017, Les Rencontres D’Arles in France); Murder Machine (2016, co-curated with Christine Eyene, in partnership with EVA International in Ireland); and Against The Current by Mark Dion (2015–2016, Ormston House, co-curated with Ian Russell).
Photo: Shane Vaughan
Merve Elveren
Merve Elveren's curatorial practice focuses on the social and cultural landscape of the 1980s and 1990s in Turkey. Her research-based curatorial practice examines critical discussions and new institutional formations around shifting political urgencies. Between 2011-2018, she has curated several major exhibitions within Research & Programs at SALT, including A Promised Exhibition - Gülsün Karamustafa (co-curated with Duygu Demir, 2013), How did we get here (2015) and Continuity Error - Aydan Murtezaoğlu and Bülent Şangar (2018).
She was the curator of the Guest Programme of the 39th EVA International-Ireland’s Biennial (2020-2021). She co-curated the project In Time / On Ground (2022) in collaboration with the Women's Library and Information Center at the 17th Istanbul Biennale. The project was also exhibited at Archive (Berlin) in the In the Inner Bark of Trees exhibition.
Recently, she curated Translated into Socialism with the researchers Sezgin Boynik and Tevfik Rada (Pykë-Presje) at Salt Galata. She is co-editor of Cengiz Çekil: 21.08.1945-10.11.2015 (2020) and co-curated A Day to Day with Zeynep Öz in the YAZ Publication Series.
In 2018, she was awarded the Independent Vision Award for Curatorial Achievement.
Jure Kirbiš
Jure Kirbiš is a curator of contemporary art at UGM | Maribor Art Gallery. He gravitates toward the libidinal, textural qualities in art. He enjoys art that titillates, arouses, tickles - art that evokes a sense of celebration, joy and a heightened mood. He prides himself on his queer sensibility, through which he explores phenomena such as artifice, architype, ersatz, mise-en-scène, cultural cross-pollination, pastiche, camp, folklore, storytelling, life online, comedy and horror.
He earned his degrees in History of Art from the University of York (UK). He worked as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (Italy). He has been working as a curator at the UGM | Maribor Art Gallery for over ten years, where he worked on exhibition projects, such as group shows Alptraum (2014), The Great Migration (2016), Even Still Sexy (2019), Invisible Hand (2023) and Tired Palm Trees (2025), solo presentations of Yotaro Niwa (2015), Kladnik & Neon (2016), Tanja Lažetić (2021), Matija Bobičić (2021), Alen & Robi Predanič (2022), Borut Popenko (2023), Ava Tribušon Ovsenik (2024) and the major retrospective of Ludvik Pandur (2021). Other projects include exhibitions of Soufiane Ababri (2019) and Jure Kastelic (2021), both at Ravnikar Gallery, Gallery.Delivery: Live, Laugh, Love (2021, Aksioma, with Sebastian Schmieg), Andrej Brumen Čop (2024, Bažato Gallery) and the May Salon 2025 (Slovenian Association of Fine Arts Societies). In 2015 he was the deputy commissioner of the Pavilion of Slovenia at the Venice Biennial. He was closely involved with the relaunch of the Triennial of Art and Environment EKO 8 (2021) and was the artistic director of EKO 9 (2024).
Photo: Luka Hernet