Beatrix Ruf

BR

Before we start—what is your main interest?

EO

Power and money. More precisely, I’m interested in how they shape the world—who gets platformed, who gets protected, and who gets alienated or left out. The Stedelijk period will inevitably come up because it’s a major inflection point, but it isn’t the core of my focus. I’m more interested in your curatorial thinking and your trajectory as a person—how you’ve built the conditions for ideas to exist. So let’s start at the beginning. I noticed you started at the Kunstmuseum Thurgau. What was that space, and what did it teach you?

BR

It’s one of the few museums in Switzerland that has full public subsidy, which surprises people because there’s a myth that Switzerland is very generous with subsidies—it’s not. The museum belongs to the Canton of Thurgau and it’s based in a former Carthusian cloister, which gives it a very special architecture to work with. The complex was saved from decay by people who convinced the Canton’s collection to move in, but it also functions as a home for disabled and psychologically vulnerable people who live and work there. Each monk originally had a small house and garden arranged around a square, and underneath are lower levels with storage and vaulted spaces. The renovation was very simple, but very good, and it made the architecture feel unusually present in every exhibition.

EO

What was your role when you arrived?

BR

It was my first museum job—a baby curator job—and I did basically everything. One of the first things I did was physically hang a Hanne Darboven exhibition, which teaches you very quickly how essential technicians are and how much the work depends on people who execute the technical side. The director then gave me a surprising amount of freedom. Because the only changing exhibition space was in the vaulted cellars, I became very interested in what I would call site-sensitive rather than site-specific work. I also realized very early on that I tend to stretch the rules of institutions—to see where the limits are and how flexible they really can be.

EO

You immediately invited Marina Abramović into the fold. What did it mean to bring her into a former cloister?

BR

It matters very much when the exhibition happened. It was soon after her split from Ulay and after Walking the Great Wall, and it was one of her first exhibitions in that new phase—mid-1990s, though I’d have to check the exact year. She was beginning to think differently about spirituality in her work, and returning to aspects of solo performance practice. She created an installation in one of the largest lower-level spaces, which had very small windows high up in the walls. She brought marble sand into the room to create something that was both physically challenging and meditative. It was also the first time she developed the ladder works—with knives, clothing, ice, and burning—a vocabulary that later became strongly associated with her practice.

EO

And Jenny Holzer?

BR

Jenny Holzer’s work in the cellar was also extraordinary. She developed a body of work connected to the Yugoslavian war, including projects that involved real human bones. She also produced a very special magazine in which, as I understand it, blood from Yugoslavian women who had immigrated was used to print the cover issue. For me, the importance of that exhibition was tied to my desire to leave a memory of exhibitions on site. With Holzer, we managed to place her stone benches permanently in the cloister garden, and they are still there. That sense of permanence emerging from a temporary exhibition felt very significant to me.

EO

How did stretching institutional rules show up in practice?

BR

Because the museum was fully publicly funded, it had a complicated relationship with sponsorship. The scale of those exhibitions and the desire to keep work were not really part of the museum’s normal DNA. So I had to find sponsors, and I learned a great deal from that process—not just about funding, but about how those relationships build future institutional networks. A foundation called the Bechtler Foundation later placed a permanent Jenny Holzer work at the Löwenbräu building in Zurich, where I would later work. In that way, earlier exhibitions already created the conditions for future work.

EO

Who were you before Thurgau? What prepared you for that job?

BR

My path was not straight forward. I studied in Zurich and in Vienna—choreography at the conservatory, and philosophy and art history at the university. I worked in interdisciplinary contexts with artists from performing and visual arts, and I was also an artist myself. I lived briefly in New York in 1982 to get what I call the Vienna dust off my shoulders, and then returned to Zurich to complete an MA. For about ten years I taught in art academies and freelanced. Only in my early thirties did I begin working more directly with exhibitions. When I was offered the job in Thurgau, I realized that the institutional structure suddenly gave form to many things I had always been interested in.

EO

How did the institutional infrastructure change you?

BR

I would say it allowed me to apply things I was always interested in but didn’t know how to apply. An institution forces you to think about collections, about what it means to invite artists, about how to contextualize work in a specific surrounding, and about what it means to relate to an audience. Performance and choreography taught me a lot about space and people, but exhibition-making brought those elements into a longer-term framework. It wasn’t just about putting up one show and leaving—it became about building conditions over time. Financing and fundraising also became part of that thinking, not something separate from it.

EO

It sounds like financing becomes a form of curating.

BR

Yes, it is. I never experienced fundraising as something horrible. For me, it is very closely linked to realization. It is about bringing together the hopes and intentions of an artist with the practical possibilities of how something can be done and what it needs to exist. That translation is part of the work itself.

EO

What did the four years at Thurgau teach you in retrospect?

BR

I learned what it means to work inside an institution and to think beyond a single exhibition. I learned how to relate to an audience and to a collection, and how to think about how a collection develops over time. I was lucky that the directors integrated me into those processes, which is not typical for a young curator. We worked with artists like Abramović and Holzer, but also Muda Mathis, Johan Geertz, and Joseph Kosuth. At the same time, I began to wonder how long one can keep doing site-sensitive work in such a specific architectural and historical context. The countryside setting, the cloister history, and the spatial limitations always shape the exhibition.

EO

And then came Kunsthaus Glarus.

BR

Yes. Glarus is a small town in the countryside, but a very fascinating place. It is very traditional, yet historically progressive because of early manufacturing and industrialization—especially cotton and silk fabrication. You get contradictions like people voting with swords on the main plaza while also inviting Leonard Bernstein for Sunday concerts. The Kunsthaus building is quasi-industrial modernism, extremely practical and extremely beautiful in its proportions and skylight spaces. The situation was essentially zero money and total freedom. The collection was shaped by an industrialist who distributed major modernist works like Picasso and Kirchner to institutions with proper climate control, while leaving the Cobra group and other forward-looking works in Glarus to point toward the future. That allowed me to work with many young artists and give them their first institutional solo exhibitions.

EO

How did the Ringier Collection shift your thinking?

BR

It began through the museum context and my time at Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, where I encountered Swiss modernist traditions connected to figures like Max Bill. Michael Ringier was just beginning to collect and wanted to bring art into the context of his family’s media company, so staff could encounter different ways of thinking about images and content. What made it special was that there was no commission and no committee—it was purely a dialogue between him and me. From the beginning, it was clear the collection would never have its own museum, but would function as a public archive in close relationship with artists. The works were meant to live with artists and be ready to do whatever the artists wanted them to do.

EO

Tell me about the annual reports.

BR

Yes, the annual reports began in 1997 and are a continuing project that gives an artist complete carte blanche. Although the company is private and does not technically need to publish an annual report, they do so out of ethics. The reports often take the form of books or unusual publications, and the list of artists over the years has been extraordinary. Some artists worked very directly with the staff, while others used the format more obliquely. Artists like Christopher Williams, Matt Mullican, and Fischli & Weiss turned the reports into unexpected publishing projects—sometimes even into objects like printed toilet paper. Because they were free, they circulated widely and became an important resource in the art world.

EO

What institutions were you looking toward in the 1990s?

BR

Glarus allowed me to think internationally, and I traveled often to London and New York. I looked closely at institutions like the Whitechapel in London, MoMA in New York, the MCA Chicago, and the Renaissance Society, which we collaborated with regularly. I was always looking for artists who had not yet been shown in Switzerland and could have their first larger institutional exposure. That created networks of visits and institutional relationships. At the same time, I recognize that we were still working largely within a Western perspective then, which institutions have since begun to question more critically.

EO

Who was overseeing the Renaissance Society at that time?

BR

It was Susanne Ghez—the legendary director who led the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago for roughly thirty-five to nearly forty years. She was truly central to its identity, a kind of fixed point for both the program and the people around it. And yes, Hamza Walker worked with her for a very long time—something like twenty-five or thirty years—but he wasn’t the director; he was an associate curator. That long continuity is part of what made the Renaissance Society so distinctive. It created a stable platform for a program that could still take serious risks. The institutional memory there really mattered.

EO

In the 1990s, that institution had an incredible history—and then there’s the Walker Art Center too. Those middle institutions—the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Walker—were driving international conversations. That’s the history I’m interested in: how those networks formed and how you all came to power, for lack of a better word.

BR

Definitely—the people from the Walker and the Renaissance Society were people I met a lot, and those institutions were extremely important. They absolutely drove international conversations in that period. You could feel the strength of their teams and the seriousness of their editorial and curatorial cultures. Those places had a way of shaping discourse beyond their geographic scale. And the people were central: you build a network through repeated encounters, shared references, and mutual attention. That mattered for how conversations moved between Europe and the U.S.

EO

It’s inconceivable now to think you had such influence from a small Swiss town, and then everyone migrates to the cities and the coasts. How do you think about that?

BR

That’s an interesting point. Zurich wasn’t necessarily a center then; it was more peripheral in a way. Zurich was important when Harald Szeemann was moving in and out of the Kunsthaus Zurich, but in the broader ecosystem, Art Basel and institutions like Kunsthalle Basel were more central than Zurich. Kunsthalle Basel is a classical nineteenth-century institution, whereas Kunsthalle Zurich was a very late foundation—it was only founded in the 1980s. Zurich didn’t really have a contemporary art institution in the same way, and that absence shaped how things developed. By the time I arrived, something different had begun to establish itself.

EO

What different energy had established itself in Zurich by then?

BR

There was a discourse of ‘closeness’ in Switzerland—this idea that every artist had to leave Switzerland in order to become an artist. That began to change with artists like Fischli & Weiss, who decided to stay and work from within that Swissness, and later with Pipilotti Rist and Ugo Rondinone. That shift was connected to the late 1980s, when Kunsthalle Zurich looked for spaces at the edge of the city rather than in the center. Independent spaces and artist-run initiatives opened, and a gallery system began to develop beyond the traditional ‘classic’ galleries. Suddenly figures like Peter Kilchmann, Eva Presenhuber, Iwan Wirth, Bob van Orsouw, and others clustered in the same area. An art scene and an interest in coming to Zurich grew out of that concentration.

EO

By the time you came to Kunsthalle Zurich, Löwenbräu was already established—how did that happen?

BR

Löwenbräu came to life because of the director before me, Mendes Bürgi. He found the Löwenbräu space and then teamed up with the Migros Museum, and the galleries moved in as partners because the rent required a coalition. Hauser & Wirth moved in, along with Eva Presenhuber, Kilchmann, Bob van Orsouw, and for a time even Phillips de Pury; later other galleries joined too. It was the first time a public institution like the Kunsthalle, a private museum like Migros, and commercial galleries functioned together in one building. That model didn’t stop—it’s still going on. It created a very specific politics of shared space that you had to navigate constantly. And it also changed how contemporary art circulated socially in Zurich.

EO

How did those politics of sharing space change the programming situation—and how did it connect to what you learned in Glarus?

BR

In Glarus I was thinking not only about exhibitions, but about how collections function in a larger collaborative context—almost as if you’re looking at the collection of a whole country. With a small but interesting collection, I started to ask what happens if smaller institutions share collections and emphasize their identities more clearly. We began exchanging long-term loans with the museum in Thun: for example, Glarus had an odd group of Swiss Pop Art that few people knew, while Thun had a strong concentration of Swiss Pop Art, so we exchanged and created stronger displays through collaboration. That way of thinking carried forward, along with what I learned from the collector-president in Glarus who distributed his collection across multiple Swiss institutions. Those experiences shaped how I later thought about collections and also about the Ringier context—and they even connect to what I’m doing now in Amsterdam, which I can come back to later.

EO

When you arrived at Kunsthalle Zurich, you said the renovation felt like an art fair. How did you decide to engage it conceptually?

BR

When I arrived, Löwenbräu had become a place where people came for parties, and contemporary art became part of a lifestyle culture. The renovation, as I experienced it, looked too much like an art fair: the same movement toward art, booth after booth, and it became hard to distinguish commerce from the public institution—especially because major galleries were in the building and were growing quickly. So we decided to reorganize the Kunsthalle’s space, and we treated the rebuilding itself as an exhibition. Without having the budget secured at first, we worked with a collaborator to choreograph the remodeling: walls coming down and going up, the black-and-white contrast because the walls had been painted black, the sequence of builders entering, even the color and placement of tools. The audience was allowed into the construction site at specific hours, and people were especially fascinated by the behind-the-scenes transformation of the institution.

EO

This was 2001. Was that kind of thinking popular then—this attention to the institution’s backstage?

BR

Yes, it was totally popular. People were particularly interested in the behind-the-scenes, in the removal and rebuilding of walls, and in the institutional frame itself. That attention was very much in the air. It connected to a wider set of practices in the 1990s and early 2000s that made institutions visible as structures. The institution wasn’t just a neutral container anymore; it became part of what the work addressed. And audiences wanted to see that mechanism exposed.

EO

You were very much in the atmosphere of institutional critique—Andrea Fraser, Michael Asher, that whole wave. How did that inform your curatorial practice?

BR

It’s something I grew up with, in a sense, as I entered curating and entered institutions. It was particularly strong in the 1990s, and then a group of artists began taking those questions back into the institution by challenging the walls—economically, socially, and structurally. I would place certain practices within that lineage, and then there were exhibitions like the 2002 project No Ghost Just a Shell. Think of Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster—artists who challenged how institutions function and what kinds of practices institutions can accommodate. No Ghost Just a Shell brought together works centered on Annlee, the manga character collaboratively acquired by Parreno and Huyghe in 1999 and then activated by a network of artists, with many pieces produced specifically for that context. It also challenged the economy of production and the post-studio condition, and it resonates strongly now as institutions struggle to support interdisciplinary practice—not only in budgets, but in knowledge and infrastructure.

EO

So how did that thinking inform your program at Kunsthalle Zurich over the twelve years you were there? What became your working manifesto?

BR

One core issue was the architecture and the experience it produced: I wasn’t happy with the booth-like movement, especially given the market’s increasing influence and the presence of expanding galleries in the building. We used the library at the front as a public proposal—so after the entrance counter, there was a free library anyone could use. We also introduced education for contemporary art, which surprisingly didn’t exist in that building at the time. In terms of institutional practice, the Kunsthalle was geared toward exhibitions and catalogues, but the idea of measuring impact through sustained relationships with audiences or educational work hadn’t really been developed. And the barrier wasn’t only conceptual—it was also budgetary and infrastructural: education requires staff, libraries require staff, and you need real budget control to build those systems. At first we built a shared education structure with the Migros Museum, and only later—around 2008 or 2009—could we hire dedicated education staff as part of our team.

EO

Architecturally, I’m thinking about models like KW in Berlin—was there a conversation with KW, or was it something else?

BR

Not really, not yet. It was more Zurich, and of course international through the artists, always. The Kunsthalle building was a former industrial space—a brewery—and it was limited in terms of space. My desire was to avoid that booth walk-by feeling, so we changed the circulation into a more meandering pathway through the rooms. I also took storage space from the technicians to create a parallel project space, because I didn’t like the Kunsthalle attitude of doing one exhibition and then never returning to the artist again. I wanted a structure where you could first have a smaller view of an artist’s practice, and then later return at a larger scale, almost like a collection logic rather than a one-off logic. For example, when I did the Wade Guyton / Seth Price / Josh Smith / Kelley Walker group exhibition in 2006, I planned to return to each with solo exhibitions later; that happened in part, and I would have needed more time to realize it fully. But the principle was: introduce, then revisit, then deepen.

EO

You said this was a different generation—artists who grew up with the internet. What did that mean to you then?

BR

For me it marked another cycle. There was a lot of institutional critique expressed in work, and we also did exhibitions that destabilized authorship through artist groups that were phantoms, or through formats where the exhibition never fully ‘opened’ because it was produced while it was already running. With artists like Wade, what interested me was that they weren’t illustrating the internet—they were showing how the medium of art itself began to behave differently because the internet had changed behavior. We think this is entirely new, but many of those questions—authorship, originality, copy and non-copy—were already developing in the 1960s through practices linked to cybernetics and systems. That historical continuity mattered to me: a new chapter opening that was both contemporary and deeply connected to earlier conceptual lineages. Contemporary art can make you recognize that behavior has changed even when you haven’t fully realized you changed, and that recognition is a critical opening. That has always been a key interest for me.

EO

Looking at the Nicole Eisenman show now, it feels like a vernacular of hanging that’s common today—but it’s almost twenty years ago. What do you remember about that staging?

BR

That was a great chapter. At that time, nobody had really looked at Nicole Eisenman in that way, and we were talking about very classical painting while also building a structure around drawing. She created what she called a ‘drawing clinic’: we built the entire first room around drawings, and she asked other artists living in Zurich to destroy them or work over them. So after the exhibition, many of the drawings were no longer ‘Nicole Eisenman drawings’ in any simple sense. The room was full of drawings and a table—she essentially offered her archive to be transformed by others. That gesture made authorship porous in a very direct and physical way. It was exciting because it turned exhibition-making into a social process rather than a stable presentation of one.

EO

This brings us to the Stedelijk. Going from a Kunsthalle to the Stedelijk is a major shift—what did it feel like traversing it?

BR

It was quite a shift, particularly in terms of scale and the number of people—going from a project-space logic into a large museum infrastructure. I was asked to bring change, and the board was behind that at first, but the institution carried trauma from a twelve-year extension project that kept it closed for a very long time. The staff grew without the time to grow in a healthy way, so there were old structures and new structures that didn’t integrate smoothly. Still, I’m actually very happy about the time I spent there, and we did a lot: projects like a full year of Tino Sehgal, where we cleared collection spaces to install individual works over time, and projects with Seth Siegelaub and Isa Genzken. We also worked intensely on reorganizing the building through the collection, which remains an exciting project conceptually. And there was the larger question the museum was already facing when I arrived: decolonizing the institution, identifying what was missing, and changing the course of collecting more generally and broadly.

EO

Elsewhere, you’ve talked about your collaboration with Rem Koolhaas around “the base” at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam—the permanent collection installation known as Stedelijk BASE, opened in 2017—what was the concept, and how did you approach decolonizing beyond simply collecting “non-Western” work?

BR

I wanted the collection to become a more active agent, not a passive storehouse. Rather than collecting wildly in non-Western areas as a corrective gesture, I wanted to look closely at what was already in the collection and ask where certain paths had been opened and then stopped. Collections contain misunderstandings and broken lines that can teach you a great deal; someone begins a thread and then nobody follows it, and knowledge disappears. We started a major research project right after I arrived, and it connected departments that rarely collaborate—design with new media, painting with prints, and so on—which is always difficult institutionally. The aim was that two-thirds of the building would be active with the collection and one-third would be changing exhibitions, while the base would experiment with chronology without forcing a dogmatic path. I wanted correct chronology, but also the freedom at any point to connect across times and categories—to put a print next to a drawing next to a sculpture next to a design object, so unexpected relations could emerge.

EO

What did that research process actually look like in practice?

BR

It was multi-year research where we kept asking the same questions again and again: what counts as a highlight, where are the misunderstandings, and why were certain lines abandoned. For example, why do certain Indigenous histories—like the Zuni artists—become impossible to locate in the archive now, even though there was a major exhibition in the 1970s—where did that knowledge go, where did it stop, and why. Another example was the Suriname collection at the Stedelijk, which simply ended and disappeared, and we wanted to understand how and why that happened. We tried to reconnect to knowledge that had once been present in the institution and to reopen discontinued lines with clarity about what it would mean to continue them now. We also experimented publicly through displays that continuously changed, so the institution could learn the collection by doing. In that sense, it was a research practice conducted in public, not only in storage or archives.

EO

You mentioned the ground floor as a generator—constellations, small shows. How did that function?

BR

It was conceived as a two-part system: the underground base installation, and then a ground-floor program that continuously created smaller exhibitions—constellations—that could inform and critique the base. Those constellations were thematic, media-oriented, and oriented toward critical histories, and they were meant to keep the base alive rather than fixed. We invited people who do not consider the museum their space, specifically to critique those small shows and the institution’s assumptions. That critical outside pressure was meant to feed into the future of the base, as a generator for how the collection could be staged. There’s also a practical reality: if you cluster a drawing next to a sculpture and a design object, the display conditions conflict—drawings can’t stay in light as long as sculptures can—so changing one element forces you to change the whole cluster. That means continuous movement and continuous labor, which asks a great deal from an institution, but it is also very exciting.

EO

And that’s why you asked Rem to do the walls—because you were fed up with thick, freestanding installation walls?

BR

Yes. In spaces without columns, you often have to build thick walls just so they can stand freely, and I was fed up with that. I wanted thin walls, and walls that moved through space like a city—more like winding paths than Manhattan rectangles. I wanted the possibility that at any point, while standing inside a chronological or media-coherent cluster, you could still see something else and choose to connect it without being told. So the wall system used different heights and angles, creating sightlines and options. It allowed chronology to exist without becoming dogma, because you could always branch out. The walls became a kind of choreography for thought, not just partitions for display.

EO

What was your relationship to the Stedelijk before inhabiting it as a director? Did distance help?

BR

In a way, I had the advantage of not having too much prior relationship, so I could approach the collection with a less nostalgic view. The basis of the system was that I wanted chronology from a curatorial point of view, but I also wanted the audience to have the freedom to make connections at any point in that chronology. The continuous restaging served two purposes: it allowed the public to experience the collection as alive, and it allowed the institution to learn from the collection in real time. It was also a way to move works out of storage that hadn’t been moved or looked at for a long time, and to recover hidden stories. Those broken stories—discontinued for reasons no longer understood—became central to how I thought the institution could move beyond a Western gaze by first understanding its own interruptions. And that learning process was part of the work.

EO

What was it like choosing Rem—was he an obvious choice?

BR

Rem is a great conceptual architect, and he’s also a friend. I knew that if anyone could figure out the experiment of freestanding thin walls, it would be a meaningful collaboration with him. For him, the project also activated his deep relationship to the Stedelijk, because he did incredible research on the museum’s historical display systems. We forget what has happened in institutions: there have been thin walls, no walls, walls that felt like fairs, walls that felt elegant, walls that felt bad—plants, different systems, everything. That research, combined with our internal collection research, helped us think concretely about how much wall space we could get and what kinds of display logic could actually be supported. It wasn’t just a formal gesture; it was a research-driven design problem.

EO

Okay—now you’re doing a new venture. Before we move forward, I want to clarify the Ringier timeline, since it’s often treated as entangled with the Stedelijk period. When did your role in collecting for Ringier end?

BR

That’s a misunderstanding I want to correct: I stopped collecting for the Ringier Collection in 2014, when I began at the Stedelijk.

EO

Do you still work on the collection at all?

BR

I’m not formally working on it, but I stay interested in what happens with the collection and I’m in conversation with them about its direction. I’m also still proposing artists for the annual reports, because that project remains unbelievably compelling. The annual reports have an agility that most institutions can’t replicate, and it’s a rare example of sustained, serious publishing as an artistic commission. So in that sense, I’m still connected to one of its most generative public-facing mechanisms. But it’s important to be clear that my role as a collector for Ringier ended when I began at the Stedelijk.

EO

Now you’re working with a new entity that seems related, but different—how would you define it?

BR

It’s totally different because it isn’t based on a pre-existing collection in the way Ringier was, and it’s structured as a foundation. That difference matters: it shifts the logic from shaping something already underway to imagining an institution from scratch. It also changes the relationship between governance, public responsibility, and the long-term horizon of what you build. A foundation can design its mission and its mechanisms with more flexibility, at least at the beginning. And that freedom opens a different kind of institutional imagination.

EO

It feels like a manifestation of what you’ve been building toward—multifaceted, infrastructural, able to orchestrate the kind of institutional choreography you’ve described.

BR

Yes—and I have to say, I’m very happy. It’s unbelievable, really, to think an institution from scratch. That kind of opportunity is rare, and it forces you to clarify what matters before the habits of a building and a bureaucracy harden. It also makes you confront what institutions typically prevent, or slow down, or structurally disallow. In this case, the project allows for a more deliberate alignment between values and infrastructure. And that alignment is deeply satisfying.

EO

It feels like you’ve often reconfigured institutions rather than built them from scratch—and now you can reverse-engineer one based on what you’ve learned.

BR

In a way, yes—always a bit. At the Stedelijk, for example, I was able to free the entrance area: I removed the poles and made it a space where people could sit, have coffee, and watch videos. At Kunsthalle Zurich, we had to secure the building itself—I had to convince the city and Migros to buy it, because otherwise the Kunsthalle would have lost its space again. For a long time, I was programming with only half a year of security, because the space could have been taken away every six months, which is unbelievable. But that kind of instability builds a muscle for institutional thinking: you learn how to move within uncertainty while still building continuity. When I was asked to propose what kind of institution one could build today—without even a fixed building at first—it gave me enormous freedom to think through what a museum could be as a set of projects rather than as a local definition.

EO

So it’s working backwards: deciding what the institution needs to do—and then building the choreography and architecture to support it.

BR

Yes. And it’s interesting, because we’re going to be in the former courthouse of Amsterdam, so the architectural character is already strongly defined by that. We’re adding white-cube space, but we’re also adding functions that aren’t always considered “standard” for an institution. Still, the underlying question remains: can you think an institution beyond localness, at least initially, and then let localness become one layer among others rather than the organizing premise? That opens questions about mobility, partnership, and what “public” means when you aren’t only thinking in a single geographic frame. It’s a way of designing civic function without collapsing it into place-branding. And that approach allows a different kind of responsiveness to emerge.

The first project I addressed was collecting, and that is already in process. I also looked closely at staffing: what does it mean to work with people who are not physically where your foundation sits? We already do that. But the major decision was this: we build a collection, but we do not own it. We build a collection for the institution, with the institution, through commissions and acquisitions, and then we give everything to the state collection. That decision returns directly to what I learned in Glarus—thinking about what it means for work to sit somewhere, and how collections behave like persons: remove one element and the identity shifts; add something and the voice changes. Editing is not neutral; it is how a collection speaks and develops.

EO

How does the collection change if it’s owned by the state? What are the benefits, and what are the politics?

BR

You have to know that this state collection doesn’t run an institution—it primarily takes care of works and manages loans. For us, the goal was visibility, flexibility, and accessibility. When a collection sits in a museum depot, it asks for slowness: every movement is an “insult” to the depot, even when movement is intellectually desirable. In the Netherlands there is also a virtual initiative called “Collecting Netherlands” that encourages institutions—and ideally private collectors as well—to look at what has already been collected so additions are thoughtful and ethically grounded. It isn’t a law, but it is an attitude: all collections together form a collection of the country. We thought: why not go directly there? Then, like any institution, we loan works back to realize exhibitions, and other institutions can loan them too, including for international projects and long-term placements.

The national collection also allows long-term loans to international museums and lets works circulate in a more flexible way. I find that very exciting. There is still a lot to develop, but as a principle it feels like a strong statement: a foundation identifying with a collection without insisting on local ownership. It reframes stewardship as a public commitment rather than as a proprietary claim. It also changes the ethical posture of collecting, because the endpoint is not private accumulation but public integration. And in the long term, it might offer a different model for how institutions relate to national cultural responsibility.

EO

If you had to summarize this new phase: what is your job now, after all these iterations? What stayed the same, and what changed?

BR

In a strange way, I think it stayed the same. A public institution is an extraordinary place to participate in civic society. Experiencing art requires not only space, but a stretchability in what that space can be—and infrastructure matters in making that elasticity real. Curators and museum directors ideally enable a space that is responsive not only to the art on display, but to its audiences and to its time. The big goal, for me, is to implant the possibility of continuous change into the institution itself. Stretching the space of public experience has been my interest from the beginning—and it remains the core. It’s exciting, and hopefully we don’t fail too much.

EO

How has the art world changed since you began?

BR

We spoke briefly about the “base,” and one intrinsic idea there was to stop presenting a chronological collection as an authority. Instead, the point was to bring in other voices, to create other narratives—and not only to create them, but to own them as legitimate. Yes, there is something called art history, but there are many more things within it, and institutions must implant that complexity as an open system for people. The authority of historical writing needs porosity: the ability to include more voices, especially if our civic institutions are to exist within democracies. Institutions have to care much more about this—that the museum is a civic space where diverse voices can actually happen. And the museum must allow things that aren’t only effective at the ticket counter.

EO

What do you mean by things that aren’t only effective at the ticket counter?

BR

It means the museum should allow experimentation, research, and the articulation of things to come—not only confirm what can be monetized or what is immediately legible as success. A civic institution has responsibilities beyond revenue optics. That requires producing a lot: knowledge, discourse, commissioning structures, and ways of working that cannot always be monetized. If you build a museum only around what sells at the entrance, you collapse its public purpose. The museum should protect a space where risk can be taken, where new narratives can be tested, and where learning is part of the institutional output. That is part of what it means for culture to function in public.

EO

I spoke with Agnes Gund recently and she said: if you’re collecting, you need to be collecting every day—it has to be your job. And it made me think about how collectors determine the conditions of encounter. I’ve also been tracing ownership lineages—like why Duchamp is in Philadelphia—and realizing how much of museum history is shaped by these private decisions. It feels like everything is folding back on itself, and maybe the future is something “in the middle” between galleries and institutions.

BR

I think there is a beauty in that, and I agree with Agnes Gund—collecting demands daily attention if it is serious. I always found it sad that from the program of Kunsthalle Zurich, nothing ended up in the Kunsthaus Zurich, and I offered multiple times to develop a model where an independent group could decide which works should enter the museum’s collection. Unfortunately, it never happened. In Bern it did: Kunsthalle Bern had a model with the Kunstmuseum, though I’m not sure if it still exists. There is always a movement through time here: collecting fixes something, while institutions decide what becomes relevant through exhibitions and through repeated attention. And I always treated solo exhibitions as a kind of commitment: I would only do a solo exhibition if I would also collect the artist.

EO

What are the rules in group shows, then?

BR

Group shows operate with different logics because they can hold other narratives and other kinds of propositions. The commitment structure isn’t identical, because a group exhibition can stage relationships, arguments, and historical framings that don’t depend on singular endorsement. But what we’re doing now—adding to the national collection—is a different game again. It becomes closer to an art-historical relevance question: what is missing at the level of the country, and how do you make additions that are meaningful and responsible. That shifts the frame from an institution’s identity to a broader civic-cultural ecology. And I hope the institution we are building will move with the questions of our current time and conditions.