Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask assembles sixteen interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist into a portrait of curatorial practice as restless inquiry — tracing his work from a Zurich kitchen to the Serpentine Gallery in London.
About This Book
Few figures in contemporary art have operated with the breadth and velocity of Hans Ulrich Obrist. This book uses sixteen conversations, each conducted by a different art practitioner, to examine how Obrist thinks about curating — not as a neutral administrative act, but as an inventive, quasi-situationist engagement with artists, institutions, and ideas. Moving through his trajectory from self-invented beginnings to his role as Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the Serpentine Gallery, the interviews collectively map a psychogeography of curatorial motivation. The result is less a career retrospective than an interrogation of what it means to organise knowledge, resist forgetting, and keep institutional practice genuinely open to the world outside it.
Key Features
- 208 pages of sixteen extended interviews with Obrist conducted by art practitioners
- Published by Sternberg Press, ISBN: 9781933128252
What You'll Discover
- How Obrist developed a curatorial methodology outside conventional institutional structures, beginning in his own apartment
- The quasi-situationist approach that underpins his engagement with artists and exhibition-making
- His thinking on psychogeography and the relationship between personal subjectivity and curatorial practice
- A sustained argument for bringing disciplines outside the art world into dialogue with it — rather than keeping contemporary art hermetically sealed
About the Author
Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs, and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. He began curating independently before moving through a range of institutional contexts, developing an approach to exhibitions and dialogue that consistently seeks new modalities for engaging with art and artists.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 208
- Dimensions: 128 x 198 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781933128252
- Publisher: Sternberg Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Curators, artists, arts administrators, and cultural theorists interested in the practice and politics of contemporary exhibition-making.