Not illustration, use; how exhibitions
reconfigure relations today
Some
critics mint a concept and spend years defending it;
Nicolas Bourriaud prefers
to keep ideas in motion. Born in 1965, he emerged in the 1990s as a curator and
writer with a taste for live encounter, provisional forms, and public thinking.
With Jรฉrรดme Sans he co-founded the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; when it opened to
the public in 2002 it quickly functioned as a laboratory where risk and
conversation outweighed ceremony. He later directed the รcole des Beaux-Arts in
Paris; helped shape MO.CO. in Montpellier as a citywide platform and curated
ambitious projects such as the Tate Triennial in 2009, where he proposed the
Altermodern framework. The books followed a similar path, not commandments but
tools; Relational Aesthetics, Postproduction, The Radicant,
The Exform.
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Nicolas Bourriaud (Credit www.radicants.com)
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The ground
has shifted again. Programme decisions now follow the logic of feeds and
dashboards; precarious labour strains the cultural field; nationalist reflexes
return; the climate crisis compresses institutional time; artificial
intelligence unsettles practice and governance. Bourriaud has argued that art’s
task is not to mirror headlines, it is to reconfigure how relations appear;
between people, and between humans and non-humans such as plants, minerals,
spirits, machines. The point is practical use, not illustration. At its best,
an exhibition changes how people spend their time; the forms it proposes
survive the opening night and return in other rooms.
What
follows is a conversation about curating with freedom and constraint, about
value and authenticity beyond markets, about ethics when working with
communities, and about what remains of the 1990s once optimism thins out. The
questions are direct. The answers do not dodge.
.jpg "Cloud Point exhibition - Curated by Nicolas Borriaud")
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Cloud Point exhibition - Curated by Nicolas Borriaud (Photography Mirko Boffelli)
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You
first wrote about relational aesthetics in the 1990s. What still holds; what
had to change?
It remains a toolbox for organising intersubjective relations; artworks that
build situations, formats, protocols of encounter. What changed are the
conditions; feeds harvesting attention, precarious labour, ecological limits,
and technologies embedded in daily life. These do not negate the intuition,
they force a recalibration.
Some
strands of 1970s feminist practice and collaborative experiments anticipated
that field. Was your book more a naming operation than an origin myth?
Yes. Naming is not ownership; it makes a dispersed field legible so others
can continue it and criticise it. The practices existed already, the book
offered a lens, a handle rather than a cage. “A label is a handle, not a cage.”
You
recently described an exhibition that pushed the relational beyond human-to-human
exchange; toward plants, minerals, spirits, robots. Why open that door; and
what did you learn?
Because non-human agencies already act upon us economically, symbolically,
ecologically. The task is to stage their presence without folklore or
moralising. In Taipei we looked at works where a plant interfaced with software
to influence stock transactions; that kind of piece makes visible how value and
agency circulate outside the human frame.
How did
that project come together institutionally; was there a true carte blanche?
It began with genuine freedom at the hosting institution; that made a
difference. We could build around questions rather than a fixed list of names,
and we could alter the display once public behaviour revealed new relations
inside the show. In Montpellier we even re-hung a room mid-run after noticing
visitors linger on thresholds rather than inside the works; that small decision
changed the rhythm of the exhibition.
What
separates relational practices from movements bound to mass communication; Pop
art in particular?
Pop belongs to a broadcast era organised by the consumer sphere. Relational
practices emerge later, in a post-production moment that privileges
hospitality, live formats, direct interaction. Today’s technologies sit inside
relations as instruments, not as idols.
You
often describe art as a transitory moment between artist and spectator, even a
democratic space. Does that still hold for you?
Yes. I like the image of art as an omega number; the sum of what exists,
plus one. Each artist adds a specific difference, a public moment where forms
and meanings are renegotiated together.
You used
the word “mana” for art’s anthropological role. How does that idea meet our
present; AI included?
Every society needs a sanctioned space for the unknown. That is part of
art’s job. Today there is also a desire to submit to higher systems, markets,
algorithms, AI. We fear them and we fantasise about handing over the keys.
Artists should not remain as external commentators; they should produce forms
that think with or against these systems, while interrogating infrastructures
such as datasets, labour, authorship, provenance.
Working
with communities raises the risk of cultural extraction. What prevents it?
There is no perfect protocol. Transparency helps; co-design authorship,
consent, reciprocity from the outset, and keep the contract revisable. Money is
one vector, but time, visibility, and sustained presence matter equally. If a
project does not leave something usable behind, it probably took too much.
Your
curatorial criteria: do you impose limits or let limits emerge from the
exhibition form?
I avoid external limits. I choose artists for the force of their ideas,
their capacity to formalise them, and the fit with the exhibition’s question. A
framework should orient attention through time, not police practice. In
“Pansori” we divided space into feedback, polyphony, and OOM; saturation,
dialogue, and a kind of cosmic communication. Structure did not constrain the
artists, it channelled the visitor’s experience.
You
spoke with admiration about Fรฉlix Gonzalez-Torres. What remains urgent in his
example; and do you recall a first encounter?
He proved political form can be hospitable; porous rather than didactic. He
reworked existing formats to be critical and constructive at once.
I met him around No Man’s Time in
Nice; later, I attended his funerals in New York in 1996, after he passed away
. His ethics of public space still
instructs us.
The
climate feels harsher than the 1990s; nationalism, totalising scripts,
automated decision making. How should art respond, with pessimism or with new
tools?
With work on perception, not with decoration of the news cycle. Some
artists, like
PierreHuyghe
, use AI
to open perspectives rather than close them. Institutions must host such
experiments and resist the reduction of value to analytics.
People
say music is more accessible than visual art. Do you agree?
Accessibility is pedagogical. Music can feel immediate, but it still demands
links between sounds and meanings. Visual art also requires tools. Simplicity
should not be mistaken for ease.
On value
and authenticity; does worth come from a signature or from the aesthetic force
of the work; and what should museums fear most today?
Aesthetic force matters, and authenticity matters. The larger risk is that
museums stop producing knowledge and slip into populism. Keep research at the
centre; under ecological pressure and political polarisation that commitment
becomes non-negotiable. As for authenticity, even celebrated cases like the
Salvator Mundi deserve scepticism; attribution is not a substitute for
experience.
Quick
choices to end; one exhibition you would revisit, one underrated artist, one
looming institutional risk, one hope for the next decade.
I would revisit the intimate,1+1 exhibition, and I intend to.
Underrated; Gianfranco Baruchello. Looming risk; ecological solutionism where
metrics and quick fixes crowd out research. Hope; that we move beyond the
climate of hate and keep a public space for the unknown open to everyone.
Usefulness
here is not a slogan, it is a practice; stage relations that last, defend a
space for the unknown against the tyranny of metrics, widen who and what gets
to be in the room. Bourriaud’s terms return as tools; ways to curate time, to
host non-human agencies without folklore, to refuse the false comfort of
engagement scores. The work, he insists, is to curate conditions where
relations, human and otherwise, can think us back.
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