Nicolas Bourriaud

Nicolas Bourriaud, born in 1965, is a curator and writer. He founded and Codirected the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, (1999 -2006), was the founder advisor for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev (2003-2007), professor at the IUAV in Venice (2006-2007), Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London (2007/ 2010). In 2010, he headed the studies department at the Ministry of culture in France, then became Director of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-arts de Paris ( 2011 -2015). Between 2015 and 2021, he founded and directed MO.CO (Montpellier Contemporain). In 2022, he funded Radicants, a curatorial cooperative producing exhibitions worldwide.
As an independant curator, he was part of the curatorial team of Aperto 1993 at the Venice Biennial, and organized many international exhibitions, from « Traffic » (Capc Bordeaux, 1996), « Estratos » (Murcia, Spain, 2008) or « Altermodern » (Tate Britain, 2009), « Wirikuta/ Mexican time slip » (Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2016), and more recently « Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime » (Venice, 2022). He also curated several biennials, including Lyon (2005), Moscou (2005 and 2007, with Rosa Martinez, Daniel Birnbaum, Joseph Backstein, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Iara Boubnova), « Monodrome » (Athens, 2011), « The Great Acceleration» (Taipei Biennial 2014), « Threads » (Kaunas Biennial, Lituania, 2015), « The 7th continent » (Istanbul biennial 2019), « Pansori. A soundscape of 21st century » (Gwangju Biennale,Korea).

Publications :

« Relational Aesthetics » (1998) Translated in 15 languages.
« Formes de vie. L’art moderne et l’invention de soi » (1999)
« Postproduction » (2002)
« Radicant. Towards an aesthetics of globalization » (2009)
« The Exform » (2015)
« Inclusions. Aesthetics of the capitalocene » (2020)
« Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime » (2022)

Curating is structured as a language.

This lecture argues that curating, as any language, has its specific grammar, distinct from the ones used in writing and visual arts. It identifies diverse patterns (the operatic model, sequencing and staging the space, mastering temporality) and rules (the production of an atmosphere, the primacy of choice ) upon which a curatorial language can be built. But above all, curating is defined by the author as « a knowledge of contacts », which leads to the construction of « relational spaces » : places where any detail has an agency.