Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating
*But Were Afraid to Ask
Everything you ever wanted to know about Hans Ulrich Obrist but were afraid to ask has been asked by the sixteen practitioners in this book. Spanning the beginning of his “career” as a young curator in his Zurich kitchen to his time most recently as the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs, and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the book is a “production of reality conversations.” It undertakes the impossible: pinning down this peripatetic curator, attempting to map his psychogeography so that silences may be transcribed. In a sense, it organizes a “protest against forgetting” and affirms the sagacity of an artist who told this dontstop curator “don’t go” when he “contemplated leaving the art world” for other fields—“to go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge”—in lieu of bringing other fields into the (then) hermetic art world.
