Curator's corner - Hans Ulrich Obrist

Presenting a new ongoing segment on the work of some of the most renowned curators across the world. As we delve deep into their work and philosophy, we hope to share their insights and advice for young curators and artists in our Art and Charlie community.

#curatorscorner – Every curator has their own process to work with artists in a way that helps their work shine. A traveler at heart, Hans Ulrich Obrist has made roughly two thousand trips in search of artists in the past twenty years. He meets emerging artists and checks in with old ones to ferment an ongoing dialogue on their practice and loves to visit small and large shows. The kind of culture he cares about is mobile and far-flung and can be grasped better on the move.

Obrist has a firm belief in expanding his knowledge far beyond the visual arts – to technology, literature, anthropology, cultural criticism, philosophy - simply because culture is becoming more interconnected across geography and across disciplines. These disciplines, in turn, become tools in Obrist’s attempt to fertilize the arts with fresh ideas.

Obrist notes that his exhibits often demonstrate what he has called a “quality of unfinishedness and incompleteness.” He doesn’t like art to have temporal, spatial, or intellectual limits. The white cube of the gallery irks him; closing dates bother him. He prefers to think of exhibitions as seeds that can grow.