Researcher and art worker, Manon Klein lives and works in Ghent (Belgium). Graduated in Humanities and Art History (Université Paris Nanterre, 2013) and in Exhibition Sciences and Techniques (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2015), Manon Klein worked as a project manager in the Performing Arts department of the Palais de Tokyo from 2015 to 2019. She notably participated in the programming and production of events organized as part of exhibitions, the artistic residency La Manutention, and the Do Disturb Festival. Alongside this institutional path, she engages in curatorial activities, particularly through the creation of non-profit associations. Driven early on by a desire for collective reflection and creation, she co-founded the associations Diamètre (bringing together young curators and art critics) and 35H (a one-week artistic residency concept). From January to December 2021, she was a curator at the PADA Studios residency space (Barreiro, Portugal). Between 2022 and 2023, she co-founded NaMesa, combining solo shows and dinners inspired by the practices of the presented artists (Culturgest, Thirdbase, various artist studios). She regularly writes texts for galleries and project spaces (Galeria 3+1, Galeria Foco, MAD). She considers art and writing as tools to compose worlds and invent languages, and exhibitions as spaces of altered consciousness conducive to exploring the constant flow of information, images, and filters that characterize our era. She thus conceptualizes exhibition projects for and with artists aiming to shake our certainties, imagining speculative narratives and alternative realities embracing magic, shadows, and the ineffable. Since September 2020, Manon has been on a doctoral contract in the Department of Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon. Her thesis is entitled "Call-out Culture: Art workers challenging British visual arts institutions from the mid-2010s to the early 2020s." In this work, she seeks to highlight the challenges and disillusions but also the hopes and aspirations of art workers by exploring movements of institutional critique and protests against precarity and discrimination in the art world.

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