Charles Esche

Charles Esche is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam. He is a member of L’Internationale Association and is developing the Three Ashes Foundation on land near Bucharest, Romania. He is professor of contemporary art and curating at University of the Arts, London and adviser at Jan van Eyck Academie and a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. He was director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2004-24) and of Rooseum in Malmö (2000-2004).

He has published in peer reviewed and other journals including on museums and exhibitions including Documenta 15/Lumbung 1 in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, on Anti-Fascist monuments in Third Text and on Demodernising in multiple titles. His latest book publications are The Museum is Multiple, Van Abbemuseum, 2024 and Art and Its Worlds, Afterall and Koenig Press, 2021. He is writing a book on Demodern Thinking with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti to be published by Duke University Press in 2027.

Among international exhibitions and biennales, he has (co-)curated Soils, Van Abbemuseum, 2024; The Meeting That Never Was, MO Museum, Vilnius, 2022; Hurting and Healing, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, 2022; Power and Other Things, Europalia, BOZAR, Brussels 2017; Art Turns, Word Turns; Museum MACAN, Jakarta 2017; Neither Forward nor Back Jakarta Biennale 2015; How to Talk about Things that don’t Exist, 31st Sao Paulo Bienal 2014, Ideal for Living, U3 Triennale, Ljubljana 2011; Play Van Abbe, 2009-11, RIWAQ Biennale, Palestine, 2007 and 2009; Istanbul Biennale, 2005 and Gwangju Biennale, 2002.

His academic and cultural focus is on the consequences of decolonial theory for Europe and its long histories of extraction, exclusion and denial. He is interested in how art and culture in these territories can respond and build a more just dialogue with cultures beyond western Europe. One methodology he is currently developing is the concept of demodernising as a way for western Europeans to approach the challenge of decolonial thinking.

“A whole house will need rebuilding”: Rooseum as Learning and the Fate of New Institutionalism

In March 2001 the artist Mark Bain lifted the six-metre wall that had divided Rooseum since it opened, swung it through the hall and laid it flat. Local musicians used the wall as a stage for the next month, and Martin Creed half-filled the basement with balloons. “There’s gonna be some trouble, a whole house will need rebuilding” was the overall title, and it announced an approach I later called experimental institutionalism. Rooseum was reconceived not as a vessel to be filled by art but as an institutional and social proposal to be tested — a fluid and self-critical “working tower of Babel” as ready to learn from the community centre, the laboratory, the club and the academy as from the exhibition.

Its educational form was Critical Studies, the postgraduate programme Rooseum set up with Simon Sheikh and Gertrud Sandqvist at Malmö Art Academy. CS had a “test site” in Rooseum for knowledge production, where art was treated as thinking-in-common rather than display. It worked with a peer group of students and around exhibitions such as Vi – Intentional Communities and Baltic Babel, alongside a collective Future Archive gathered from those passing through and studios for artists’ residencies and productions.

The paper looks back at that four-year period to ask what became of experimental institutionalism. I follow a path through possibility, and then the impossibility imposed by neoliberalism, to end up outside state mechanisms on the land of the Experimental Station and Three Ashes in Romania, where we are building whole houses again