Malmö Art Museum is currently hosting an exhibition about curating exhibitions. Setting the Tone of the Exhibition – The Anatomy of Exhibition Openingsis organised by Jacob Fabricius, and he has structured the exhibition as five proposals for five potential exhibitions. Two of these will be fully realised in February, one at the Lilith Performance Studio in Malmö and the other at Institut Funder Bakke in Silkeborg.
Fabricius is the director of Art Hub Copenhagen and has previously been at the helm of Kunsthal Aarhus (2016–2021), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2013–2014), and Malmö Konsthall (2008–2012). However, it is his work as a curator that has made him particularly known on the international art scene. Few Danish curators have masterminded as many exhibitions as Fabricius.
Since the 1990s, he has curated his way to every corner of the globe. Most recently, he co-curated the Korean Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, and in 2020 he curated the Busan Biennale in South Korea. He is known for his surprising concepts, which often challenge the exhibition format itself.
In 2004, he walked up and down a street in Brooklyn for an entire week, each day wearing a new sandwich board. Instead of advertising some local diner, the boards displayed art created for the occasion by John Miller, Aleksandra Mir, Adrian Piper, and others. Ten years later, when he repeated the project on the same busy street near Brooklyn’s City Hall but with new artists, he told Kunstkritikk: “Public art often lacks a ‘mailbox’. It offers no way [for the public] to respond to the statements made by the art.” This idea prompted him to carry the sandwich board on his own body, enabling him to present the art and answer questions. As a result, Fabricius was embroiled in a great number of conversations on the streets of Brooklyn. And this is just one example of his many unconventional concepts; others include exhibitions sent via messages in bottles across the Sound or displayed on public benches in Los Angeles.
Fabricius could be described as an NGO curator driven by a keen curiosity about art and cultures he wants to explore more deeply. He is almost always working on some project, large or small. Among friends, he is nicknamed “A4 Jacob” because he almost always has something, “just a tiny piece of paper,” he wants to slip into your suitcase if you’re going someplace where he’s got an ongoing project – those missives often turn out to be bulkier than a single sheet of paper.
Since 1997, Fabricius has also run the publishing house Pork Salad Press, responsible for nearly one hundred publications. He is currently making waves as an author with Setting the Tone of the Exhibition – The Anatomy of Exhibition Openings, a book of conversations with fifteen international curators. The book, like the Malmö exhibition, is part of Fabricius’s postdoc work at Aarhus University.
The book focuses on exhibitions as both practice and concept, and the conversations are surprisingly concrete. The curators generously share their experiences, guiding the reader through considerations on issues such as spatial flow, how to come up with exhibition titles, and how to foster the most rewarding collaborations with artists.
Fabricius interviewed Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Cécile Debray, Liu Ding & Carol Yinghua Lu, Massimiliano Gioni, Hyo Gyoung Jeon, Haeju Kim, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Christiane Paul, Marie Hélène Pereira, Shubigi Rao, José Roca, and Nadim Samman. From the Nordic region, he spoke with Maria Lind and Anna Weile Kjær. The final chapter is an interview with Fabricius himself, where his questions include asking the “other” Fabricius about exhibitions he did not see himself. A humorous twist, but as always there is a purpose behind the concept.
Curators rarely speak so concretely about their work as they do in this book. Most seminars and panel discussions on curating specific exhibitions tend to quickly move away from the physical spaces at the heart of the matter. What were your intentions with these engine-room conversations?
I wanted them to be factual and tangible. What do you actually do when creating an exhibition from start to finish? How do you approach a space, an institution, or a theme? Do you apply a soft or hard tactic? Who do you involve to ignite the conversations you’re interested in? At the same time, we speak primarily of what can actually be seen. We could also have talked about insurance costs, transport, logistics, and all sorts of other things. But the intention was always to keep the focus on the conceptual and aesthetic perspective, taking our starting point in specific exhibitions.
Perhaps this also has something to do with the curators you talk to. What criteria did you apply when making your selection?
I wanted to speak with curators who have significant experience, who have done major exhibitions, biennials, and the like. I also wanted people who aren’t afraid to use bold approaches and surprising tactics. I would have liked to include more from the older generation, such as Kasper König, who unfortunately passed away very recently, or the French curator Catherine David, one of the first to seriously introduce contemporary Middle Eastern and African art into European institutions. But every time I found myself in Paris, she had just left for Beijing or somewhere else, so that fell through. I could, of course, also have talked to more artists who curate. Shubigi Rao, who lives in Singapore, is the only artist-curator in the book. It would also have been fun to include curators who work in a more explicitly political manner, such as Ute Meta Bauer or ruangrupa, who were behind the last Documenta.
Ultimately, the curators in the book are all ones I’ve followed for a number of years. I know almost all of them, but in different ways. Some I’ve had close collaborations with, without us ever having had a cup of coffee together. You know each other, but you never really get to have deep conversations about these kinds of things. The book was the perfect opportunity, and sometimes I was a bit starstruck, but it was also super exciting to finally meet them and talk about the core of what we do.
Several of the curators refer to writers when explaining their curatorial concepts. Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, for example, pop up in connection with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Massimiliano Gioni. Given their Italian backgrounds, that may not be so surprising, but it’s still a bit unexpected to see such literary classics mentioned by two curators who have been behind some of the most innovative exhibition formats of our time. You yourself have also drawn on fiction in several of your exhibitions. What is so special about this particular mental space in relation to exhibitions?
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev studied linguistics and philosophy and subtly weaves literature and language into her exhibitions in various ways. The curatorial duo Liu Ding & Carol Yinghua Lu use texts and books more directly in their curation. At the recent Yokohama Triennale, which centred on the Chinese writer Lu Xun’s poems and philosophy, the duo scattered texts throughout the exhibition. At Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale in 2013, the entire exhibition opened with C. G. Jung’s Red Book [2009]. It was placed in the very first room, the first thing the viewer encountered, and from there the exhibition unfolded. But never in a fixed way. That’s what’s great about how these curators work; they never employ a firmly locked-down narrative, but rather a red thread that can also accommodate the viewer’s own contributions.
The fascination with literary references or strategies likely stems from the fact that incorporating multiple art forms naturally fosters cross-aesthetic thinking, which expands the scope for interpretation. As Eco wrote in his essay ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, a good work is always open to interpretation. That’s the core of it. And perhaps Calvino is the literary textbook example of Eco’s theory. When you read Calvino, you find multiple universes opening up simultaneously. Often, he speaks directly to the reader, forcing you to reflect on a specific question. He extends a hand, but at the same time makes the handshake so very soft that you’re not locked into a single interpretation. There’s nothing worse than a limp handshake, but in this particular case the author’s soft touch is a stroke of genius. I think the same kind of gentle handshake, a subtlety of handling is what characterises good curating.
Installation view, 15 Rooms, 2015, Long Museum, Shanghai. Curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Courtesy of Long Museum Shanghai and the curators.
Some of the conversations stand out from the rest, such as the one with Hans Ulrich Obrist where the interview – in very Obristian style – follows a concept focusing on how he arrives at exhibition titles. It’s a fun read with a distinctive tight structure. What were your thoughts on the interview formats?
Some of the curators I met in person, others preferred to do it in writing, and some of the interviews were conducted over the phone, so the conversations are quite varied. It should be said that you never really have what you would call a proper conversation with Obrist, and there was nothing stringent about how this interview came to be. It happened during the opening days of the Venice Biennale in 2022. The agreement was made late at night, settling to meet the following morning at 8:00 in the lobby of the Hotel Bauer. After our first coffee, we moved on to Caffè Florian, and people were constantly coming up to say hello, so the interview took place while he was having other conversations too and dealing with all sorts of things. By 9:00, he had to moderate a panel discussion, so the last part of the interview happened at a third café while he was being mic’d up and eating an entire pack of Tuc biscuits.
Including Obrist’s conceptual approach was important. He is very knowledgeable, incisive, and good at taking something intangible and making it very concrete, as with Take Me (I’m Yours) [1995] or Laboratorium [1999]. He turns the curatorial work itself into a readymade, as is particularly evident with the Do It concept. Since 1993, he has been saying “do it” to countless artists, curators, and institutions, and then they’ve done it. These are reproducible exhibitions based on a simple concept.
Most of the conversations revolve around group exhibitions, partly because many of the curators have organised numerous biennials and similar mega-exhibitions. Early in your career you also created many group exhibitions and were known for your fun, bold, and zany concepts. I have a sense that the exciting and experimental group exhibition – which emphatically is not the kind of biennial meant to boost tourism or camouflage a dubious regime – has been somewhat in decline over the past decade?
That may be true. But you can also geek out about the overall issue of setting the tone when creating a solo show. That’s one of the points I discuss with Cécile Debray. She was behind the quite extraordinary Sophie Calle exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Paris in 2023 – a sort of Calle retrospective that unfolded across the art historical canon as embodied by Picasso’s oeuvre.
I still think the group exhibition is a super-interesting format. The electricity sparked between works by different artists is fascinating, even if it’s sometimes completely invisible and is all about the right placement of a single piece. There’s nothing better than sensing a real interplay going on – when you can just tell that the artists have been in the space and thought things through. When I enter an exhibition, I can tell within seconds if things have just been slapped up on the wall without any effort to have the work relate to each other.
For me, things probably underwent a shift while I was director at Malmö Konsthall. Apart from Little Theatre of Gestures in 2009, which I did with Nikola Dietrich, we transitioned to almost exclusively do solo shows there. In 2018–19, I curated the group exhibition Post Institutional Stress Disorder at Kunsthal Aarhus, a cumulative exhibition that began with just one work and ended up with more than fifty works twelve months later. The concept allowed me to think and plan long-term while also giving me scope for acting quickly and including works I’d just discovered. That kind of controlled, but short launch ramp suits me very well. But yes, generally speaking group exhibitions take time; the thought process takes time.
Perhaps there just isn’t enough time for group exhibitions anymore?
Time is certainly a factor and a practical issue. When you do a solo show, all communication takes place with that one person or with the people who work with that one artistic practice. When you do a group exhibition, you often find that while a given artist has said yes, they did so before they knew who will be next to them in the exhibition. So as far as those potential glitches or interactions over the metaphorical fence are concerned, that’s where the curator has to step into the fence and argue in favour of one particular direction. There’s a lot of diplomacy involved – a lot of conversations – and it’s all really cut from the same cloth as any disputes you find between neighbours in semi-detached houses. I think I could’ve made a good diplomat … do you think it’s still possible to change careers? But yes, time becomes an issue in a large group exhibition. That said, Setting the Tone for the Exhibition, which I’ve curated for Malmö [1] Art Museum, is quite an experimental group exhibition.
Reading the conversations, it becomes clear how much curating is a craft, a métier. At the same time, several curators hint that they work quite intuitively. Does that surprise you?
No, not really. Because when things become too calculated you won’t have the lofty lightness in the space and in your head that you really need. It’s like pianist Glenn Gould’s interpretations of Bach’s‘Goldberg Variations’ [1741], where there’s a thirteen-minute difference between his 1955 and 1981 recordings. It’s a matter of practice: he knows the piece, sits down, and does it again and again, but he uses his intuition to move in and out of the piece differently, which then results in such variation in time.
Now that you’ve had the opportunity to get inside the heads of some of the most interesting curators active today, is there anything in particular you’ve learned or been surprised by?
I’ve enjoyed talking to all of them. But if I were to point to one thing in particular, it would be Massimiliano Gioni’s account of how he mentally revisits his past exhibitions at night. Rather like the Bach piece, he plays them back time and time again, lying in bed and going through his Venice Biennale room by room. He moves one way around a work and then goes back again. He observes the relationship between two works and considers how he guided the viewer to turn right around a particular piece, and so on. It’s quite fascinating and says a lot about the level of detail in his curatorial work. I’ve never thought about replaying my curatorial film in that way.
Jacob Fabricius, Setting the Tone of the Exhibition – The Anatomy of Exhibition Openings, published in December by DISTANZ Verlag.
