Art Metropole

#14264

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating*: *But Were Afraid to Ask

Writer

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Editor

April Lamm

Date

2011

Publisher

Sternberg Press

Format

Monographs

Genre

Arts Writing

Foreword by Tino Sehgal, afterword by Yona Friedman
Interviews by Jean-Max Colard, Robert Fleck, Jefferson Hack, Nav Haq, Noah Horowitz, Sophia Krzys Acord, Brendan McGetrick, Markus Miessen, Ingo Niermann, Paul O’Neill, Philippe Parreno & Alex Poots, Juri Steiner, Gavin Wade, Enrique Walker

Everything you ever wanted to know about Hans Ulrich Obrist but were afraid to ask has been asked by the sixteen practitioners in this book. Spanning the beginning of his “career” as a young curator in his Zurich kitchen to his time most recently as the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs, and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the book is a “production of reality conversations.” It undertakes the impossible: pinning down this peripatetic curator, attempting to map his psychogeography so that silences may be transcribed. In a sense, it organizes a “protest against forgetting” and affirms the sagacity of an artist who told this dontstop curator “don’t go” when he “contemplated leaving the art world” for other fields—“to go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge”—in lieu of bringing other fields into the (then) hermetic art world.