Hans Ulrich Obrist

EO

In 2003, you conducted a landmark interview with J.G. Ballard. You asked if he’s interested in the art of the times. He responded, “On the whole my views coincide with those of the great Brian Sewell, but I see the young British artists of the past ten years or so from a different perspective. They find themselves in a world totally dominated by advertising, by a corrupt politics carried out as a branch of advertising, and by a reality that is a total fiction controlled by manufacturers, PR firms, and vast entertainment and media corporations. Nothing is real, everything is fake. Bizarrely, most people like it that way.” How has Ballard’s conceit aged?

HUO

When I first started my Instagram, I was focused primarily on noting formulas. When I was interviewing J.G. Ballard, I asked him to write down his formula for working. He wrote, “Sex multiplied by technology is the future.” That interview was the beginning of our collaboration. I haven’t read it in years, but I actually stumbled upon the paper where he wrote down that formula earlier this afternoon.

EO

Most people who interview you always reference your first exhibition World Soup: The Kitchen Show (1991). Who were you before that exhibition? What were you looking for from art? And, who are you now, given all the work you’ve done?

HUO

[Laughs.] Yeah, that’s a few questions. The past, the present, the extreme present, and then the future. Ballard was influential for the books the Serpentine did with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar: The Age of Earthquakes (2015) and The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021). And, it’s true that The Kitchen Show is a kind of beginning because it’s the first show I did. With that said, I was already working in the art world for quite a long time. So, you’re totally right, there is a long period before The Kitchen Show which isn’t talked about.

I started to become obsessed with art in my early teens. I grew up in a small town, Weinfelden, in the canton of Thurgau in Switzerland. There’s a lake there that connects Austria, Germany, and Switzerland called the Lake of Constance. Commuting across the border was a daily occurrence. There is a bigger German town, the University of Konstanz, which we went to for the cinema and shopping, for instance. And, as a teen, you could cross during school for lunch breaks. I could never leave my house without my passport or identity card. But, when I was seven years old, I was in a car accident. It was a near-death experience. The accident played a key role in my development; it was a definitive before and after moment.

EO

It’s strange when something like that happens to you, outside of your control, and yet it leaves you forever changed.

HUO

It was a very strange yet productive time for me. On my commute to school, there was this abandoned, seemingly haunted, Thomas Mann–style house near the park. During lunch breaks, we would always pass by it, and at some point I became obsessed. A teacher of mine told me it used to be a mental sanatorium run by Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist, writer, and pioneer of existential psychology. He mentioned that Michel Foucault’s first book, Dreams and Existence, is about Binswanger, and that the clinic had treated a number of notable patients. One of them was Aby Warburg.

Warburg’s story stayed with me. He had suffered from paranoid psychosis and was treated first by Sigmund Freud and then by Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, where he began researching the persistence of pagan antiquity in the Renaissance, alongside the rituals and symbolic systems of the Hopi community in Arizona. During this period, he developed his work on the snake, which would later become Schlangenritual, a study of Hopi snake-handling ceremonies. He was also the son of a prominent banking family in Hamburg, and made an agreement that he would not take over the business in exchange for being allowed to buy any book he wanted. He went on to found the Warburg Library, which was later moved to London during World War II and became the Warburg Institute, and began his unfinished Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a work-in-progress series composed of 63 panels covered in constellations of images.

That project, more than anything, stayed with me. It pushed me to begin collecting postcards, which piqued my curiosity in art. Between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, I started assembling my own postcard “museum” shows in cardboard boxes. That’s the beginning of my curating.

EO

Let’s talk about Édouard Glissant.

HUO

In 1999, when I met Glissant, he told me that we needed to find new forms of engagement. He said we can’t keep doing art, design, and architecture shows behind closed doors. We have to move towards creating platforms to reach everyone.

EO

What about your foray with night trains?

HUO

When I was seventeen, my obsession with traveling across Europe for studio visits began. I saw an exhibition in St. Gallen by Claude Sandoz with my parents, featuring work by the Swiss artist from Lucerne. I asked to meet him, and while that wasn’t possible, they offered to pass along a letter. This was pre-Internet. I wrote it, and soon after, I was invited to visit his studio. Everything accelerated from there.

The following week, I got in touch with Fischli & Weiss, which was a revelation—I was able to witness them working on Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) (1987). From there, I traveled to Rome to visit Alighiero Boetti, who told me, “Art is not only about what artists do; you should ask artists about their unrealized projects and help to make them happen.” I was then sent to Gerhard Richter, who taught me about painting and how to install a show, and to Rosemarie Trockel in Cologne. She told me, “The art world is totally neglecting women artists. Whenever you are in a city, you should ask, ‘Who are the women pioneers who haven’t had the exposure they should have?’” I took her advice and followed it.

That’s how I met Maria Lassnig in Vienna; decades later, we worked together on her exhibition at the Serpentine. Five years ago in New York, I asked artists who had been working since the 1960s and still lacked visibility. Several pointed to Faith Ringgold, noting that she had never had a museum show in Europe. I went to see her, and we organized a show at the Serpentine. These were the kinds of tasks artists gave me when I was seventeen. I continue to carry them out today.

EO

[Laughs.] I was going to say you’re a kind of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles figure—the kitchen operating simultaneously as exhibition space and narrative constraint.

HUO

[Laughs.] I interviewed Chantal Akerman about it.

EO

Do you still feel a sense of urgency in terms of how you approach work?

HUO

Yes, I do. It’s interesting, because our conversation began with J. G. Ballard. When we first spoke, he asked me to describe my work. I began talking about curating, and he stopped me—he felt that word didn’t quite describe what I was doing. He said it was closer to a form of junction-making, a practice that sits between organizing, producing, and connecting. That has stayed with me, and it’s often the first thing I think about when I wake up.

My focus is on creating dialogues that can address the challenges of our time. Every morning, I try to connect two people who have not yet met. I also have a few rituals: I always read fifteen minutes of Édouard Glissant. For me, his work is a kind of toolbox. I want everything I do to contribute, in some way, to Glissant’s ideas of mondialité and the archipelago—forms of relation that resist isolation and fixed identity.

The poet and artist Etel Adnan, who was an important mentor to me, passed away some weeks ago. She told me that we need to listen to one another—that we must focus on love rather than suspicion, and on a shared future rather than separation. I carry that with me. I want my work to contribute to the world not only through what might be called curatorial practice. It’s not simply about placing objects on a wall. Of course, when I bring works together in a group exhibition, that is a form of junction-making. But the larger aim is to bring people from different worlds into relation.

EO

In your conversation with J. G. Ballard, he speaks to a similar impulse: “Very few people today are old enough to remember how traumatized Britain was by the Second World War (which in many ways we had lost). The British were locked into an exhausted present, and were trying to find their way back into the past, where they hoped they might be happier and discover their former certainties. A hopeless quest. A new future has to be built from scratch…”

HUO

I’m glad you brought Ballard back into it, because I often quote his junction theory, even if I haven’t returned to his books in some time. For me, Édouard Glissant is the writer who functions as a real toolbox for the present. His work anticipated so much of the current moment and proposed possible responses to it. The accuracy is astonishing. His thinking has appeared at different points throughout my life—it’s almost as if all roads lead back to Glissant.

Before The Kitchen Show, my encounters with Alighiero Boetti were central. He gave me the methodology I continue to use today, and he was also the first person to speak to me about Glissant. I mention Glissant here because of the extreme condition of globalization we are living through now. There have been many phases of globalization, but what we are experiencing today is, without question, one of the most intense and violent.

Glissant described this condition as a tension between two forces. On the one hand, there are the destructive forces of homogenizing globalization, which lead toward erasure and extinction. On the other, he predicted—already three decades ago—a counterreaction: new forms of nationalism, separation, and suspicion. These tendencies have only been intensified by COVID-19. Against both, Glissant proposed the concept of mondialité—a way of thinking relation without collapsing difference.

What is particularly striking in relation to the present is that Glissant also positioned himself early on as an environmental thinker, attentive to natural systems and their fragility. His friend, Manthia Diawara, who teaches cinema studies at NYU, recently moved to a small fishing community in Senegal, where he is working with fishermen, pebble collectors, and migrants on a film addressing a series of fatal floods caused by climate change.

EO

You said that Glissant is the author of the moment for you. Before Glissant, who was it? Because his work has been one of your most consistent projects for the last few years.

HUO

Since we met him in 1999, it’s been at the forefront of my thinking for a long time. But I was reading him for over ten years before I met him—Alighiero Boetti told me about his work in 1986. I’ve read most of his published books and some unpublished texts that he gave me. Before Glissant, it was Robert Walser. But Glissant never went away.

EO

Can you tell me about Walser?

HUO

I’ve read everything by Robert Walser, the German-speaking Swiss writer, who was introduced to the United States by Susan Sontag. Toward the end of his life, he stopped publishing and devoted himself to long walks. He became an extraordinary wanderer—taking extended, solitary walks that have always stayed with me. I’ve often thought of myself as a wanderer between routes in a similar way.

Later in his life, he continued writing, but on tiny scraps of paper, his script becoming smaller and smaller. People believed he was writing in a secret language. That’s where my own obsession with handwriting comes from. He was never able to support himself through writing, and spent his final years living in an asylum. He worked as a copyist, an inventor’s assistant, and a butler. He died in the 1950s, found frozen in the snow. Who are the writers you’ve read completely? Who are your writerly obsessions?

EO

I don’t think in terms of obsessions, but there are moments where I’ve been fundamentally changed. When I was younger, I read a great deal of Charles Bukowski’s poetry. I’ve also returned often to Richard Siken’s Crush, which won the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize.

More broadly, I’m drawn to writing that engages structures and systems, which is something I recognize in Etel Adnan’s practice. Her work feels almost architectural in the way it is constructed.

HUO

Etel Adnan initially wanted to become an architect, but she told me that as a woman in the 1940s and ’50s, it was impossible. For one of my exhibitions, she made a plan for a house she had always wanted to build. It’s very beautiful—a kind of architectural drawing, a proposal. Her great unrealized dream was to build that house, and I still hope that one day someone will. The link to architecture in her work is an important observation. I was magnetically drawn to her leporellos because they bring together poetry, visual art, drawing, and painting into a single form.

Your question also connects to where I situate myself between art and poetry. I come out of the visual arts—that’s what I was immersed in from my early and late teens into my mid-twenties. I was doing obsessive research, meeting artists, visiting studios. But I realized that one can only really understand the forces within visual art by also understanding what is happening in architecture, music, literature, and science. Before that, I was largely ignorant of those fields. I had studied ecology and economics in the 1980s, so there was already an awareness of environmental questions, but I knew very little about poetry.

When I first began going to Rome, I would call Cy Twombly. At one point he said to me, “You don’t know anything about poetry?” It was a beautiful challenge. I began reading poetry obsessively and sought out poets in the same way I had sought out artists. I’ve had these intense research phases throughout my life. In a sense, I have always remained a student. That stands in opposition to the idea of ever becoming an expert. I am always learning, always aware of how much I don’t know—and that, to me, is what makes it exciting.

EO

How do you feel about the specialist versus the generalist framework?

HUO

I think it has to do with a fluidity of practice, but one that remains rooted. Again, Édouard Glissant is central here. At his 80th birthday, which took place in a crowded jazz club in Paris organized by Agnès Troublé (agnès b.), a philosopher asked him, “What are you doing with this guy?”—because I was clearly not part of the academic philosophy world. [Laughs.] Glissant responded, “Hans-Ulrich, he’s carrying my thoughts into different worlds—spaces where I want my work to be.”

That same evening, he told me there was someone else doing similar work, and that we needed to meet. For ten minutes, we moved through the crowded room as he searched for Manthia Diawara. When we found him, Glissant said, “I want the two of you to be friends. I want you to work together.” It was less a task than the gift of a new relation. Since then, Manthia and I have worked closely together. He later articulated something that has stayed with me: that being rooted in one’s own culture or discipline is essential, but only if it does not lead to exclusion or the annihilation of other roots. Roots must extend, touch, and protect one another—there are no singular roots. That idea made me reflect on my own position within the art world. We are living in a moment where generosity must become a medium.

This also speaks to curating and exhibition-making. Why do I continue to work in this format after more than thirty years? Because it offers extraordinary possibilities. Being rooted in the exhibition as a form allows me to bring different worlds together. For example, with Utopia Station, which Rirkrit Tiravanija, Molly Nesbit, and I developed for the 50th anniversary of the Venice Biennale in 2003, we invited Agnès Varda to present Patatutopia. It connected food scarcity and the idea of a concrete utopia. I told her it was an experiment—that we wanted to use the platform differently. She said she had spent her entire life showing films in cinemas and festivals, and that this invitation was unlike anything she had experienced. I told her, “We want you to change us—we don’t want to tell you what to do.” She arrived at the Biennale dressed as a potato, and that moment opened up a new trajectory in her practice. For the next fifteen years, she made installations around the world, including a major work at LACMA. That is the freedom the exhibition can offer.

At the same time, I’m increasingly thinking about durational formats. Even as I believe in the exhibition, it is often still bound to event culture and deadlines. There is a broader shift happening that requires us to think in more sustainable, long-term ways. Roman Krznaric writes about this in The Good Ancestor, which calls for liberating society from short-termism.

In terms of practice, this becomes concrete. When I met Precious Okoyomon a few years ago, I immediately understood their work as both fluid and visual—poetry, installation, and ecology intertwined. Their gardens are also architectural forms. We worked together on a Park Night in London and later a poetry exhibition in Manchester. Other artists—Otobong Nkanga, Yinka Shonibare, Adrián Villar Rojas, and the designers FormaFantasma—are also pointing toward agriculture, toward farms. When artists begin to say they would rather make a garden or a farm than an exhibition, that has to be taken seriously. It may require us to rethink the structures we work within.

I also read Alexis Pauline Gumbs, with whom I’ve had many conversations. Her book Dub engages the work of Sylvia Wynter—not as inspiration, but as a way of thinking with her. I recently completed an interview with Wynter, which had long been an unrealized project. For a long time, she did not want to give interviews. When Manthia Diawara and I sent her questions, she responded with handwritten notes and drawings—sometimes just a single sentence. Receiving that envelope, after it had been sent to the wrong address and finally arrived, was one of the most meaningful moments of that year.

EO

Sylvia Wynter remains strikingly under-theorized as a thinker, especially given the scope of her intervention. I spent a significant amount of time with her work in graduate school, in a course on architectural enclosures co-taught by Mabel O. Wilson and Saidiya Hartman.

HUO

Exactly. When I visit an artist, I always try to understand who they think with. When I visit an architect, I want to know with whom they make architecture. It’s not about genealogy, but about relation. That’s what I love in Édouard Glissant’s Sartorius, where people exist only through relation, never in isolation. That question—“Who do you think with?”—is always my starting point. Then I ask: what is your advice to a young artist or poet? What do you want to transmit? And, of course, I ask about unrealized projects.

Over time, I’ve built an archive of thousands of unrealized projects. One of my own unrealized projects is to curate an exhibition of all of them. Every time I get close, something interrupts it, so it remains unrealized. But I would love to realize it—it would be a beautiful show. I also have other unrealized projects: writing a novel, which I only ever carried to page ten, and developing an experimental school. If you think of Black Mountain College, it brought together mathematicians, composers, artists—different forms of knowledge in relation. I recently spoke with Dorothea Rockburne, who is still very active, about her time there. She described going on morning walks with scientists.

There is no equivalent to Black Mountain College today, and I feel that absence strongly. I think there is an urgency to build something like it again. I’m also interested in other formats—curating a game show, for example. The idea of a game played by hundreds of millions of people is compelling to me, and I wonder what it would mean to think of a group exhibition as a game. I’ve also been developing an unrealized project with Philippe Parreno in France, which looks back to Jean-François Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Pompidou—an important early attempt to connect technology, art, and science.

EO

Pavilions are an important platform for young architects. Why did this initiative begin?

HUO

It began in 2006, when Julia Peyton-Jones, then director of the Serpentine, invited me to join her. Together with Zaha Hadid—who had also designed the North Gallery—she had initiated the idea of a temporary pavilion. Architecture is typically slow; pavilions are comparatively fast, and because they are less constrained, they allow for a greater degree of experimentation. At the same time, there was a desire to introduce more modality into what was then a relatively insular English architectural scene. Zaha had moved to London in the early 1970s to study at the Architectural Association and graduated in 1977, but it wasn’t until her Serpentine Pavilion in 2000 that she realized a building in the UK. Figures such as Oscar Niemeyer and Kazuyo Sejima had likewise not built there.

The premise, then, was to invite architects of that caliber who had not yet had the opportunity to build in the UK, and to open the architectural dialogue outward. After I arrived, we continued the series with architects including Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron, and Jean Nouvel.

Around six years ago, it became clear that while the pavilion had foregrounded pioneers who had not yet built in the UK, it had not sufficiently engaged a younger generation that had since come of age. We began to shift the program accordingly, starting with Smiljan Radić. In 2018, we worked with Frida Escobedo; in 2021, Sumayya Vally—the youngest architect to date—realized her first built structure through the pavilion. We also invited Junya Ishigami, Lina Ghotmeh, Theaster Gates, and Diébédo Francis Kéré. It felt essential to open the platform to new generations and new voices.

Earlier in my career, I worked closely with Cedric Price, much of whose work remained unrealized. He has been an enduring reference point for me, particularly his concept for the Fun Palace, developed with Joan Littlewood. The Fun Palace was never built, but it proposed a radically flexible institution—a space that could shift from opera house to conference room to community center to exhibition. That idea remains unrealized, and perhaps still necessary.

EO

That’s true, though it seems that OMA and Rem Koolhaas draw on aspects of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace in the Taipei Performing Arts Center.

HUO

Cedric Price once said that “a 21st-century institution has to utilize calculated uncertainty and conscious incompleteness to produce impactful work—the catalyst for invigorating change whilst always producing the harvest of the quiet.” That, for me, is a synthesis of what an institution could be.

I worked very closely with Price during the last ten years of his life. We produced a book of interviews and organized several exhibitions together. It was also one of the reasons I was so excited to join the Serpentine in 2006—it offered the possibility of producing a new architectural reality each year. The annual pavilion commission allows the experiment to continue, to remain alive. When I first moved to London, the idea was to invite Price to build a pavilion. It would have been an extraordinary moment at the end of his trajectory. Sadly, he passed away before that could happen. The Fun Palace, of course, was never realized. But there were other works—like the Aviary at the London Zoo, which he completed in 1963 with Antony Armstrong-Jones. It remains one of my favorite structures. Norman Foster is now restoring it.

EO

What is your relationship to collaboration?

HUO

I always felt skeptical about curating shows on my own. Why would I not collaborate? First of all, I believe we can do more together than alone. It’s not about ego. Second, I grew up in Switzerland as an only child. The combination of Switzerland and being an only child created solitude. My medium is conversations. I develop things in conversations. I think it’s also true for arts organizations. Given the complexity of our world and what it means to run an arts organization in the 21st century, it seems almost absurd that the museum would have one director. That’s why we came up with the co-directorship at the Serpentine. I’ve never run the Serpentine alone. We have this model of the Artistic Director and the CEO. Bettina Korek and I run the Serpentine in very close dialogue.

EO

How do you approach conversations you’re not prepared for?

HUO

I had a long conversation with Vitalik Buterin, who invented Ethereum. Five years ago, when I did that talk, I really didn’t know that much about blockchain, so I had to prepare and read about it. I can’t meet with someone and have no idea what I’m talking about. Then, I’m wasting his time and my own time. I genuinely want to learn and understand. Each conversation is like a crash course on someone’s world.

EO

I love interviewing people because it creates the conditions for me to learn new things.

HUO

It’s incredibly exciting. To return to the idea of the “production of reality,” I’m reminded of an unrealized project by Barbara Steveni and John Latham of the Artist Placement Group. When I was in London in the 1990s, I spent a great deal of time with both of them. They had this remarkable idea that every company, every brand, and every government should have an artist in residence. Mark Bradford takes this even further when he says that artists need a seat at the table where decisions are made. That pushes beyond the museum and the exhibition space. Every major company should have an artist on its board. I would love to help realize that—to curate those relationships, to match artists with institutions.

There is also a growing desire among artists to work in more public, embedded ways. Another unrealized project of mine is to build a global agency for public art—something that could operate across cities, rural contexts, and unexpected sites. There are, of course, important precedents, such as the Public Art Fund, but I think there is still enormous potential for a more expansive, international model. Alongside that, I’ve long imagined a solo exhibition with David Hammons and Jean-Luc Godard.

Another unrealized project is to curate a brand. I’ve been in conversation with several, but what interests me is the idea of shaping an entire brand as a curatorial project. This goes back to my conversations with Virgil Abloh, who approached both his life and his work—at Off-White and Louis Vuitton—through a deeply curatorial lens.

And then there are projects at a different scale altogether. I’ve long been interested in decentralization and the blockchain, and in what it might mean to curate a city. Twentieth-century cities have largely been organized from the top down. That model no longer interests me. We need to think about more effective, bottom-up approaches—not only to curating cities, but to curating worlds.

EO

Where do you feel the most at home?

HUO

Maybe night trains are my home. As Gilles Deleuze said, “Être au milieu des choses mais au centre de rien”—to be in the middle of things but at the center of nothing. For practical reasons, and for the books, London is where my work is now. Before that, it was Paris for fifteen years, when I was working at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. I haven’t spent much time in Switzerland. Between Paris and London, there was also a period in Rome, when I curated the Villa Medici for three summers. At the same time, I was teaching in Venice, so I would travel by night train from Paris to Venice—Paris, Venice, Paris. Then I moved to London. During the lockdown, I began spending more time in Switzerland again.

You mentioned defining home as where the books are, which I think is exactly right. Books have always been central to my life. I have a slightly obsessive way of writing, editing, and curating them—I usually work on one or two each month. To make books, I need to be surrounded by them. In a way, books come out of other books—not only in terms of content, but also in terms of form.

If home is where the books are, then mine are dispersed. They are in London, in Zurich, and largely at LUMA Arles, where my archive is held. They are also in Chicago.

EO

Tell me about Chicago.

HUO

I have an archive in Chicago because of Joseph Grigely. In the early 1990s, we worked on an exhibition together, and he decided that he wanted to archive me. I found that surprising, since it is usually the curator who archives the artist. But he explained that his practice is precisely to archive others.

He had already worked on the archive of Gregory Battcock, whose materials had been left behind after his murder in Cuba. Grigely recovered and began working with that archive, and through that experience developed an interest in archiving as an artistic practice. We then made an agreement: every time I publish a book, give a lecture, or write an article, a copy goes into a box, and at the end of each month I send him that box. In my office, it’s simply called the “Grigely Box.” We’ve been doing this since 1992.

At the School of the Art Institute of the University of Chicago, generations of students have worked on this archive—building a bibliography, but also expanding it as an artistic project in its own right. There is currently a year-long exhibition at the Serralves Museum showing the archive and the work Grigely has developed around it with his students. It’s very much his artwork. I provide the raw material, but the project itself belongs to him.

You see, that’s quite different from my own archive.

EO

Do you ever feel like material to yourself?

HUO

No, I feel like I’ve just begun. It’s all about beginnings. I'm only ever beginning.