A Different Experimental Institutionalism

Talk with writer and curator Charles Esche.

In the 2000s, Charles Esche was part of a wider curatorial push to reform the existing infrastructure of public art institutions inherited from the Cold War and the ideologies of social democracy. Those institutions had allowed art to flourish in many ways under state patronage. By the 2000s, the model was exhausted and experimental or new institutionalism emerged as a response. We will outline some of the strategies that have been used in the past 20 years, looking at questions of delinking and relinking, decolonising and demodernising, renarrating, situated knowledges, arte ütil and the power of inequality and the market. Today, public institutions are facing fundamental challenges, attacked from different sides for failing to respond enough to social and political changes. Perhaps it’s time for a renewed attention to what the art institution might do for artists, and for art and culture more broadly. What remains valid from experimental institutionalism and decolonising? How do artists and curators respond to much more limited state support limited and greater ideological control? 

This talk will outline this trajectory for art and its place of production and display. Afterwards, we would like to encourage participants to bring their own analysis of the current situation. We will be joined by curators Nina Cramer and Ida Bencke, who will outline their own practices, and we would ask some of the participants to develop short presentations to open a transgenerational discussion together with all the participants. Responses to prepare might address some of the following questions: What do emerging artists and curators expect of the ‘art system’? Where can you take initiatives and what seems out of your control or capacity to influence? Does the prospect of the current art scene change the way you make work or talk about it? To what extent does the current situation feel secure or sustainable? What comes next?

Bio

Charles Esche is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam. He is a member of L’Internationale Association and is developing the Three Ashes Foundation on land near Bucharest, Romania. He is professor of contemporary art and curating at University of the Arts, London, and adviser at Jan van Eyck Academie and a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. He was director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2004-24) and of Rooseum in Malmö (2000-2004).

He has published in peer reviewed and other journals including on museums and exhibitions including Documenta 15/Lumbung 1 in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, on Anti-Fascist monuments in Third Text and on Demodernising in multiple titles.  His latest book publications are The Museum is Multiple, Van Abbemuseum, 2024 and Art and Its Worlds, Afterall and Koenig Press, 2021. He is writing a book on Demodern Thinking with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti to be published by Duke University Press in 2027.

Among international exhibitions and biennales, he has (co-)curated Soils, Van Abbemuseum, 2024; The Meeting That Never Was, MO Museum, Vilnius, 2022; Hurting and Healing, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, 2022; Power and Other Things, Europalia, BOZAR, Brussels 2017; Art Turns, Word Turns; Museum MACAN, Jakarta 2017; Neither Forward nor Back Jakarta Biennale 2015; How to Talk about Things that don’t Exist, 31st Sao Paulo Bienal 2014, Ideal for Living, U3 Triennale, Ljubljana 2011; Play Van Abbe, 2009-11, RIWAQ Biennale, Palestine, 2007 and 2009; Istanbul Biennale, 2005 and Gwangju Biennale, 2002.

His academic and cultural focus is on the consequences of decolonial theory for Europe and its long histories of extraction, exclusion, and denial. He is interested in how art and culture in these territories can respond and build a more just dialogue with cultures beyond western Europe. One methodology he is currently developing is the concept of demodernising as a way for western Europeans to approach the challenge of decolonial thinking.

The talk is free and open to all.