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curatorial statement.
We often think of knowledge as something that can be stored in books, museums, archives, or institutions. Yet some of the most enduring forms of knowledge exist elsewhere—in gestures, landscapes, materials, rituals, oral traditions, and everyday practices transmitted through lived experience. These systems are dynamic, relational, and constantly evolving. They challenge conventional distinctions between art and craft, object and process, research and practice, and expert and community.
My research explores how relationships between people, materials, territories, and cultural practices generate living systems of knowledge, and how curatorial practice can translate those relationships into meaningful public experiences. Drawing from anthropology, contemporary art, and museum practice, I approach exhibitions not simply as spaces for presenting research, but as sites where knowledge can be translated, negotiated, and produced collectively.
Rather than treating exhibitions as endpoints, I understand them as one moment within a broader ecology of research that unfolds through long-term collaboration, fieldwork, archival inquiry, dialogue, writing, and public engagement. My work develops through sustained relationships with artists, cultural practitioners, and communities, recognizing these relationships not merely as sources of information but as sites of knowledge production in themselves.
I believe exhibitions are spaces of encounter. Their purpose is not to deliver answers, but to cultivate curiosity—to create the conditions in which people can encounter unfamiliar ways of understanding the world and, in doing so, discover new dimensions of themselves. Curatorial practice, for me, is fundamentally an act of translation: transforming complex cultural, ecological, and material relationships into experiences that invite reflection, dialogue, and shared understanding.
Through my work, I seek to develop curatorial methodologies grounded in reciprocity, situated knowledge, and ethical collaboration. I am particularly interested in how museums can learn from the ways communities create, preserve, embody, and transmit knowledge across generations, and how exhibitions can make these living systems visible without reducing their complexity.
Exhibitions are not where my research ends. They are where research becomes public.
bio.
Sophie Bonet (b. 1986) is a South Florida–based curator whose practice is deeply informed by her background in social and cultural anthropology. She approaches exhibitions as living ecosystems—responsive spaces shaped by memory, ritual, materiality, and transformation. Her transdisciplinary work is research-driven and grounded in the belief that art functions as a site of dialogue, cultural inquiry, and collective imagination.
Bonet has contributed to exhibitions and public programs at leading institutions in the United States and abroad, including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA), where she served as Exhibition Manager for landmark exhibitions including Juan Francisco Elso: Por América (organized in partnership with El Museo del Barrio), Didier William: Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè, and Jamea Richmond-Edwards: Ancient Future. Her early research at MACBA focused on the archival documentation and critical interpretation of Espai 13, tracing more than three decades of artist-led experimentation initiated through the Joan Miró Foundation.
Currently serving as Chief Curator of The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery in Pembroke Pines, Florida, Bonet leads an exhibition program centered on accessibility, sensory engagement, and community-rooted storytelling. Alongside her institutional practice, she maintains an active independent curatorial practice, organizing research-driven exhibitions and collaborations with artists, galleries, and nonprofit art spaces throughout South Florida, including Edge Zones and Fundación Pablo Atchugarry Miami.
Bonet holds degrees in Fine Arts, Art History, and Anthropology. Her research investigates how relationships between people, materials, territories, and cultural practices generate living systems of knowledge, and how curatorial practice can translate those relationships into meaningful public experiences. She is particularly interested in long-term collaborative research, embodied forms of cultural transmission, and exhibitions as spaces where knowledge is not simply presented, but collectively produced. She is a member of IKT – International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art.
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