Kaunas Bienial Board is glad to announce Nicolas Bourriaud as the curator of 10th Kaunas Biennial, which will take place through September – December, 2015 in Kaunas (Lithuania).
Nicolas Bourriaud, born in 1965, is the Director of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-arts de Paris since December 2011. Before heading the Studies Department at The Ministry of Culture in France, he was Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London (2007/ 2010) and advisor for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev. He also founded and codirected the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, between 1999 and 2006.
As a curator, he recently organised Estratos in Murcia (2008), Altermodern at Tate Britain, London (2009) and The Great Acceleration (Taipei Biennial 2014).He published well known and broadly discussed theoretical essays, including Relational Aesthetics (1998), Postproduction (2002) and Radicant (2009).
Nicolas Bourriaud titled Kaunas Biennial curatorial project Treads / A Fantasmagoria about Distance.
“Fantasmagory, both as a technique and an ideology of the image, could be the forgotten historical model for today’s art practices: the way artists embroider stories in a mixture of fictions and social reality, inhabiting the interstices between the real, the illusion, the image and its interpretations, seems to connect to the ambitions of the 18th century’s “fantasmagorists” — their will to include the viewer into total environments that recall our installations, the way they combined scientific ambitions, esoteric knowledge and spectacular practice”, – starts with his concept N. Bourriaud.
During his first visit to Kaunas Nicolas Bourriaud will introduce his concept and curatorial context. A meeting / press conference is planned on Moday (5th of January, 2015) at 11:00 am. Venue will be announced soon. Please register for information: info@kaunas.biennial.lt
More about Nicolas Bourriaud
Curated Exhibitions (selection):
Unmoving short movies (Venice Biennale, 1990).Curator for the Aperto (Venice Biennale, 93).
Commerce (Espace St Nicolas, Paris, 94).
Traffic (Capc Bordeaux, 1996).
Joint Ventures (Basilico gallery, New York, 96).
Le Capital (CRAC Sete, 99).
Contacts (Kunsthalle Fri-Art, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2000).
Touch (San Francisco Art Institute, 2002).
GNS (Palais de Tokyo, 2003).
Playlist (Palais de Tokyo, 2004)
First Moscow Biennale (Moscow, 2005) co-curator with Rosa Martinez, Daniel Birnbaum, Joseph Backstein, H-U. Obrist, I. Boubnova.
Lyon Biennale (2005)
Are you Experienced ? (Pescara, Budapest, Bucarest, 2006-2007)
Second Moscow Biennale (2007).
Estratos, Murcia (2008)
Altermodern, Tate Triennial, London (2009)
Monodrome, Athens Biennial (2011)
The Angel of History, Palais des Beaux-arts, 2013.
CookBook, Palais des Beaux-arts, 2013.
The Great Acceleration / Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial, 2014.
Books:
« Relational Aesthetics » (Presses du reel, 1998 –French,2002 –English). Other translations: Yugoslavia, copyleft edition, 2000. Denmark, Royal College of art, 2005. Turkey, Baglam, 2004. Norway, Pax editions, 2005. Argentina/Spain, A. Hidalgo, 2006), Norwegian, 2007, Greek, 2007, Slovene (2007), Chinese (2013), Japanese (2015).
« Formes de vie. L’art moderne et l’invention de soi » (Denoel, 1999).
« Postproduction » (Lukas & Sternberg, 2002, English. French version: 2004, Presses du Réel. Spanish version: Adriana Hidalgo, 2004. Italian: Postmedia books, 2004. Turkish: Baglam, 2004, Czech (2005), Norwegian (2007), Greek (2007), Slovene (2007).
« Radicant » 2009 (in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese)
To be published in 2015: « The Exform » (Verso, UK ; Adriana Hidalgo, Argentina)