Max Borka

After graduating in literature, Max Borka (1954) worked for more than two decades as a researcher, dj, critic, and journalist for a radio station, newspapers and magazines, before becomimg the director of the Interieur Foundation and Biennale in Kortrijk, in his country of birth, Belgium. He later also founded and directed designbrussels and co-founded DAMn° magazine, before moving to Berlin, where he launched Mapping The Design World and state of DESIGN, organizing the Nieuwe German Gestaltung exhibition series and the state of DESIGN, BERLIN festival. He recently resigned from state of DESIGN to concentrate on Mapping the Design World, write his PhD, and start an artistic partnership with Frank Akino, Akino&Borka. „In whatever I did, I've always been a mediator, trying to communicate the experimental, the radical, critical, alternative, and socially oriented, in the arts and design, but also in politics, to the largest audience possible, in an effort to stir a debate. 

I never made myself too many illusions about the effects, But it's the principal that is important“. Borka published some twenty books, and curated exhibitions such as Nullpunkt and Spagat, Design Istanbul Tasarimi at the Marta museum in Herford, Germany, and Istanbul Alphabet at the Museum der Dinge in Berlin (together with Anna Pannekoek). For more than 40 years, Max Borka has also been teaching. During the last decade, he taught design history and -theory at the School of Arts / KASK in Ghent, Belgium, La Cambre / École nationale supérieure des arts visuels in Brussels, and the Fachhochschule Potsdam, Berlin. He presently lives in Ostend, Belgium.