Curator’s Perspective: Nicolas Bourriaud
Friday, March 8, 2019
6:30-8pm
Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Elebash Recital Hall
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
FREE and open to the public

As part of ICI’s Curator’s Perspective—an itinerant public discussion series featuring national and international curators—Nicolas Bourriaud, Director of Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo), will present on the theoretical framework underpinning his current work as the Curator of the 16th Istanbul Biennial that will take place between September 14 and November 10, 2019.

Bourriaud will contribute to the Biennial’s history of strong curatorial statements since its creation in 1987. Seeing the city itself as “a crossing point,” Bourriaud has said he will consider the special significance of Istanbul in today’s “global political era marked by binary thought, and try to build an exhibition that measures up to our historical situation.”

For the last 32 years, the Istanbul Biennial has engaged an exhibition model that enables a dialogue between artists and the audience through the work of the artists instead of a national representation model. Ten years ago, ICI’s Curator’s Perspective Series began with an inaugural lecture by Vasif Kortun—the first single curator to direct the Biennial independently in 1992.

Nicolas Bourriaud, born in 1965, is a curator and writer. He is the curator of the 16th Istanbul Biennial director of Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo), an institution he created, gathering the La Panacée art centre, the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the future MoCo Museum, which will be opened in June 2019. He was the director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris from 2011 to 2015. From 2010 to 2011, he headed the studies department at the Ministry of Culture in France. He was Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London from 2007 to 2010 and founder advisor for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev. He also founded and co-directed the Palais de Tokyo, Paris between 1999 and 2006.

Bourriaud’s recent exhibitions include Crash Test, La Panacée (2018); Back to Mulholland Drive, La Panacée (2017); Wirikuta, MECA Aguascalientes, Mexico (2016); The Great Acceleration / Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial (2014); The Angel of History, Palais des Beaux-Arts (2013); Monodrome, Athens Biennial (2011) and Altermodern, Tate Triennial, London (2009). Nicolas Bourriaud was also in the curatorial team of the first and second Moscow Biennials in 2005 and 2007. His selected books are The Exform (Verso, 2016); Radicant (Sternberg Press, 2009); Postproduction (Lukas & Sternberg, 2002); Formes de vie: L’art moderne et l’invention de soi (Denoel, 1999) and Relational Aesthetics (Presses du reel, 1998).

This event is free and open to the public. To attend, please RSVP to [email protected] with NICOLAS in the subject line.

Co-presented by the James Gallery and Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY.