Doreen Mende is a curator, public scholar, and director with a focus on the geopolitics of exhibiting in the afterlives of the global Cold War. Her approach is informed by researching archives of socialist modernities of the global East in Europe in relation to diasporic societies of the Middle East, West-Africa, and South-East Asia. Her particular concern addresses continuities of colonial infrastructures and the legacies of decolonization and anti-fascism, and thus, investigates the entanglement of the postcolonial constellation with the post-communist condition for worldmaking of the present. She is currently concluding her monograph In Transit. Geopolitics as Curatorial Condition.  

Mende has been the director of the cross-collections research department at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) Germany since 2021. At SKD, she initiated the Stannaki Forum: Art and Research in Conversation, which focused on the diasporic knowledges resonating in the 500-year museum complex; the Transcultural Academy on "Futurities" (2023) and "Unfinished Publics: Art and Democracy" (2024). Between 2015 and 2025, she has been Associate Professor of curatorial politics at HEAD Genève in Switzerland where she was head of the research-based Master and Phd Forum CCC of the Visual Art Department until 2021. Between 2007 and 2015, she was faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute’s Roaming Academy. With a project grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, she has been Principle Investigator of Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism (2019-2024, www.entangledinternationalism.org), also organizing a series of exhibitions and programs under the umbrellas of “inter∞note” and  “Sequences” with Oralities Research Lab in Rajasthan/India, blaxTARLINES in Kumasi/Ghana, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Albertinum, and the VanAbbe Museum. 

Mende is a founding member (with Tom Holert and Volker Pantenburg) of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin that co-curated the Farocki Restrospective (2018) including the Farocki NOW Academy, and initiated research frameworks including Navigation Beyond Vision (since 2018) as well as TheLegal Form of Images (since 2023).

Major exhibitions include The Missed Seminar (2022/23) with Steve McQueen on the legacies of the friendships between Eslanda Robeson and Paul Robeson with Franz Loeser and Diana Loeser at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin and Albertinum in Dresden; Candida Höfer: Context. A Dresden Reflection (2024) at Kupferstich-Kabinett in cooperation with Semperoper Dresden; KP Brehmer Real Capital – Production at Raven Row London (2014); Phenotypes – LimitedForm by Armin Linke at ZKM Karlsruhe (2007). Co-edited volumes include The Missed Seminar with Avery F. Gordon (2024 Spector Books); Stannaki Forum. Art and Research (2024 Hatje Catz); Navigation Beyond Vision with Tom Holert  (2022 e-flux Sternberg Press MIT Press); Double Bound Economies with Estelle Blaschke and Armin Linke (2013 Spector Books); DISPLAYER with Wilfried Kuehn (2007-09 HfG Karlsruhe). Notable solo-authored articles include “The Time Lag of defa-futurum: A Socialist Cine-Futurism from East Germany” in Oxford Handbook for Communist Visual Cultures (2019), “The Undutiful Daughter’s Concept of Archival Metabolism” (2018), and “The Code of Touch: Navigating Beyond Control, or, Towards Scalability and Sociability” (2020), both in e-flux Journal.

Mende was an independent consultant for the UNESCO Office Middle East and the first Research Fellow of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut in 2011, followed by collaborations with Ashkal Alwan, Beirut Art Center, Sharjah Art Biennale Off-Site Ramallah, Quattan Foundation, Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Delfina Foundation, Magic of Persia, Mohammad and Mahera Foundation for Art and Culture. In 2025, she is writer-in-residence of Muzeum Susch Art Stations Foundation in Switzerland.