Dobrila Denegri: I would like to start this conversation by asking about your beginnings. You studied politics and economics, am I correct? When you actually started to be interested in art, what were your concerns when you started to make your first exhibitions and curatorial projects?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: The point of departure was conversations with artists. Even before my studies, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I started meeting artists and going to many exhibitions. I would say that conversations, which are now published in the Interview book, are really a point of departure for my work as a curator; these conversations, the principle of conversation itself, are the basis for my work. Later, at the beginning of the ‘90s, these conversations gave rise to my first exhibitions. They came out of the discussion with a sense of what would be urgent or what the artists would like to do in terms of shows, and also with a desire, at the beginning of the ’90s, to explore possibilities that are not only within the exhibition spaces of contemporary art but also in unexpected contexts. Actually, Christian Boltanski and Peter Fischli & David Weiss, who were the artists I was in close contact with at the time, encouraged me to organise an exhibition in my kitchen. That was the beginning, and from there I started to invent and put into practice my first museum, which is Museum Robert Walser (1993), dedicated to a Swiss writer and situated in the vitrine of a restaurant where he always went during his walks. At that time, I also organised a Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Nietzsche-House in Sils Maria. The first exhibition in my kitchen triggered a lot of rumours, even though the public wasn’t numerous, maybe thirty visitors in three months, as you might see, it was quite intimate exhibition, but what was important is that persons who saw it started to tell lot of stories, they started to talk about this idea of making a show in a kitchen. Out of this, I was invited to raise a grant in Paris in 1990 or 1991 at the Cartier Foundation, which at the time had a kind of residency program on the outskirts of Paris and hadn’t yet moved to its present Jean Nouvel building. I stayed in this village for about three months, and there I met some young artists who were my neighbours, such as Absalon, who had just arrived from Israel, and Huang Yong Ping from China. This was for me the decisive moment: leaving Switzerland and being able to stay in Paris for three months, make many, many studio visits and soon after meet people, like Suzanne Pagé and her colleagues at the museum, and so, immediately after started the work for the museum and that was actually the beginning of, let’s say, my museum-related activity. So, in my case, the grant I received was significant, and it also underscores the importance of grants for young curators, which are still very rare and should be more common. I think that at the beginning of a young curator's career, it is extremely important to conduct research. And many things that happened in Paris during this research period were essential to my work and to many exhibitions. For example, at that time, Huang Yong Ping and Hou Hanru had just arrived in Paris, and we met and began an immediate dialogue that led to our later collaborations, such as “Cities on the Move” and many other shows. 

DD: Talking about the first exhibitions you did triggers my curiosity - how was the actual “Kitchen show”? Who was exhibiting? What was it about? Why can it be considered important for your future work?

HUO: There were some elements in “The Kitchen Show” that became very important in the later shows: first of all, it was a strong involvement of the artists. This was crucial for me: close work with artists on the exhibition as a medium. For this show, I had very intense dialogues with artists, and that’s how it started, I asked all of them to propose a project for the kitchen, which involved various questions like: why use the kitchen as an exhibition space, or what does it mean to do a work in the kitchen? I also asked artists to collaborate in a more involved and profound way, which is why, for example, the documentary photos of the exhibition are by Fischli & Weiss. This is something that can be found in later shows; I could give you an example, such as a title of the exhibition given by Douglas Gordon, or similar projects where basically everything is done by the artists. In the case of the “Kitchen” catalogue, which artists also did, it was conceived like an artist book, actually a very special edition composed of small books, posters or small works, depending on each artist’s project. I think that the catalogue is also an exhibition.

DD: Apart from the encounters with artists and dialogues with them, are there any theoretical positions and inputs that were decisive for your formation and work? Have you looked upon the work of curators of previous generations as models, or have you tried to invent your own concepts and paradigms?

HUO: Actually, I am very interested in visiting and re-visiting the past of curatorial experimentalism. I think there is an unwritten history of experimental curating, and the literature on it is really insufficient. 
What should I also mention, if we are talking about the beginnings, is the book that was real trigger for my interest in laboratory conditions, for the idea of museum as a laboratory that we can find in the writings of German museum director Alexander Dorner, who run the Hanover Museum in the 1920s and did the famous room with El Lissitzky “The Abstract Cabinet”, and then had to go in the exile to America in the ‘30s to escape Nazis. Dorner was a very, very important influence for me, particularly through his main theoretical work, “Ways Beyond Art”. 

DD: It was a sort of manifesto for the activity of Museum in Progress at a certain point…

HUO:  Yes, exactly, it was a trigger for Museum in Progress, and Kathrin Messner, Josef Ortner and I all had the same interest in Dorner’s ideas. At the same time, I was very interested in Willem Sandberg, whose work was another great inspiration for me. Obviously, as I said before, there is a significant lack of literature; there are no books in print about Dorner, and the book of famous radio lectures by Sandberg is only in Dutch. This led me to think about how I could learn more about this history, and I started to re-run the museum's experimental history. I wanted to fight this increasing amnesia, which makes it particularly urgent to remember the great moments of experimental museum-exhibition history in the 20th century, which can still serve as a point of reference for our contemporary condition. There are people like Pontus Hultén, Seth Siegelaub, Harald Szeemann and Johannes Cladders. These people worked very closely with artists and were there in the moment when more and more museums risked becoming disconnected from the artist, celebrating only their own commissions, their sponsors, etc. I think it's very important to revisit the models of Pontus Hultén, Walter Hopps, and Johannes Cladders, who worked very closely with artists and spoke to me about Sandberg and Dorner. Some of these people are in their seventies, and they started working in the ‘50s. By revisiting them and conducting long interviews, I could bring together some parts of this big puzzle, this unwritten history. Many of these interviews are now published in an “Interview” book, such as one with Pontus Hultén, Walter Hopps, and Billy Klüver, who is also one of the pioneers of curating and who connected artists and scientists through Bell Laboratories. For me, his Laboratory years, particularly in the ‘60s, were very useful to be revisited in terms of curating. 
It’s very intriguing and strange that, at the moment, there is not much literature on curating and historical models, despite the fact that there are now more curators than ever; now the focus is much stronger on museums than on curating. So my personal answer to this amnesia is just to try to develop dynamic memory through these conversations with some of the protagonists. Another interesting art historian is Hubert Damisch, with his first MoMA experiences and his non-linear displays, where the viewer had to find their own way and create their own parallel answer/question history. That is very interesting to me, this urge to revisit certain museum models, which can be very useful to this day.

DD: How would you define a curator's work?

HUO: I think it is difficult to pin down. It is very broad and general activity. In my own case, it has to do with conversations, with research and finding ways to realise projects. Still, most of all, it has to do with being a junction-maker: I am putting people in contact, artists and architects, or artists and scientists, to create these trans-disciplinary collaborative situations. On the other hand, curatorial activity involves a lot of practical work, organisation, and fundraising when working within an institutional context. So, curatorial activity is complex within a complex environment. 

DD: You told me that museums are a major source of inspiration and reference for your work. Could you focus more on that? 
You founded museums such as the Museum Robert Walser or the Nano Museum; you are interrogating yourself about the model of the Museum of the 21st century… could you describe your vision for these models? 
What is a museum for you?

HUO: I think what is interesting about the museum is this notion of time storage and a dynamic way of using memory. The difference between working in a kunsthalle and in a museum is that in a museum, you have a collection. I really believe in the possibility for contemporary artists to revisit a collection of pieces to create dynamic links to history. 
Memory is very much occupied by the reactionary, conservative forces who have a static idea of it. If you look at recent research in neuroscience, and I have collaborated with some of the most important neuroscientists, you can realise that memory is actually dynamic. We did a show together with Laurence Bossé in Rome, in Villa Medicis, and the second edition of this three-year project dealt with memory. In the catalogue for this show, my interview with Israel Rosenfield and Daniel Libeskind is published. I want to quote Rosenfield in this sense, who sees that memory is not static in the brain but dynamic. So I think that museums are a great way to propose this non-static, dynamic concept of memory, and that is surely something I use in my work. For instance, during the project “Migrateurs”, which featured young artists, I received a proposal from Denis, inspired by a painting by De Chirico. What he wanted to do was reactivate this painting, so he realised a sculpture of an object he found in the painting, and then this autonomous sculpture became a sort of skateboarding ramp in front of the museum. So he shifted painting into sculpture and then placed the sculpture in public space. What came out was a completely new approach to De Chirico, a link between De Chirico and skateboarding. This is a very unexpected connection, and for the museum, it is very important to have this kind of cross-relations.
The other thing that I found very inspiring was when Laurence Bossé and I curated the exhibition “Nuit Blanche”, which presented the whole Nordic scene of the ‘90s, not just through visual arts, but also film and music. We wanted to underline that scene as very dynamic, so we involved artists like Olafur Eliasson, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Henrik Håkansson, and Aki Kaurismäki in the cinema, as well as Huutajat and Mika Waimuth for noise and electronic music. So on the one hand, we had all these protagonists of the young scene, and on the other, downstairs in the museum, a historical show curated by the museum's director, Suzanne Pagé. This exhibition focused on visions of the north and featured a large number of Munch paintings. That attracted a very wide public: about 100,000 people came to see Munch, and at the same time, they had a chance to see current trends and works in art and other fields.
Also, vice versa, there was a smaller public that came because of the younger artists and then also saw the historical part.
I believe a lot in this crossing of the public. I think that this idea of “a public” is very demagogical – I refuse the idea that there is something like “a public”. I think there are many notions of audience… I don’t think there is a homogeneous audience or a homogeneous public. I believe that, through exhibitions, we can reach very different visitors, groups, and communities. That was the example I was talking about before: people come for one thing, but at the same time they have an opportunity to see something else, so it is about surprise, about the opportunity to allow yourself to change, to meet the unexpected. 
The museum has to offer this possibility. It is less interesting to isolate contemporary art – I love the dialogue that spreads from the present to the past: a dynamic memory.

DD: Do you see that the role of curator has changed from these pioneering figures of the ‘50s and ‘60s to today?

HUO: I think there is always repetition and difference. In my case, I don’t see a significant difference between how I work and how these people worked in previous decades. They worked in close dialogue with artists, and I also learned some of the most important things from them in conversation. I’d say proximity to the artist is the clue. I suppose that thirty or fifty years ago was pretty much the same; Pontus Hultén probably learned a lot from Jean Tinguely and met many artists through him. 
So for me, the conversations with artists are crucial, also because they talk about other artists, and this is very important part of the research. 
Of course, there are changes, beginning with the fact that the art world is today much, much bigger than before, so the proportion of research has changed considerably. In previous decades, and even during the ‘80s, there were very few centres where art production and major exhibitions took place. Maybe curators had made a few trips to New York, London, Cologne, centres - you know what I mean, and then they could think that they had collected all the information. One big change, for sure, is the multiplication of centres. It’s no longer possible for one curator to see everything, for a single curator to do all the research. So, even in the state of permanent research, one has to concentrate on a few research projects a year to really go in depth. We are facing the notion of complexity and uncertainty. Particularly, I think the curator's situation is very complex, and when we try to work out how to deal with it. I think it's important not to reduce and settle on one model but study a few different ones: historical and contemporary, and most of all, take an experimental approach. The danger today is that, because of this multiplication of centres, a curator who mounts a biennale or another large exhibition travels to 50 different cities and spends 24 hours in each. Still, if he or she spends 24 or 48 hours in a single place, he or she cannot see everything. The research is slow, very slow, and that has never changed. For me, it's all about this slowness. I live in an accelerated environment; I have a very accelerated life. I do a lot of trips and fast movements, and the only moment when it gets interesting is when I’m able to reinject slowness. For example, I have been to Mexico five or six times over the last two years, and there I curated an exhibition in a small house where Luis Barragán lived, for which I invited artists and architects to create projects. So this has been an evolutionary research-exhibition lasting more than a year. I think that this has become a real research, the process of going there, working there, meeting artists and being in close collaboration with some of them, such as artist Pedro Reyes or architect Fernando Romero – and these are the moments that are most satisfying for me, moments when I think that curatorial research makes really sense. 
On the other hand, I have been to Asia dozens of times in the last six or seven years, for Cities on the Move, and afterwards for other projects. I did a show a few months ago at the museum in Paris called “Camera” with Chang Yung Ho, Yang Fudong, Wang Jian Wei, two very interesting artists, and an architect from China, which is basically the result of five/six years of research in Asia. It is not just another group show of young Chinese artists; I dealt with the question of which particular artists we want to go in-depth with for monographic exhibitions. 
So I think that the curator paradoxically is today very much in this tension between acceleration and slowness, much more than in previous decades. As I already pointed out, it is extremely important to re-inject slowness. One way of doing this is through monographic exhibitions. I started doing many more solo exhibitions here at the museum, which is my main work, than before, when I did many group shows or projects with young artists. The question now is to work on monographic exhibitions with a single artist for a year or more and to find a transdisciplinary way to show the practice of this artist. What we tried here, together with my colleagues, as Laurence Bossé, the director of ARC and other co-curators, is to do a solo exhibition of Olafur Eliasson or Philippe Parreno, or also Anri Sala, what we tried is to show the practice of this artists in relation with other fields, as architecture or science, practices with whom these artists actually work. 
The other change we have to take into consideration is the multiplication of biennales and places to work; so it's not only that a curator today does more extensive research, but he is actually involved in projects happening in many different contexts and places. Over the past years, I have been involved as a curator or an advisor in biennales taking place in many different countries, and this is not only my case but also that of many curators of my generation: we have been working in thirty or forty countries, and that definitely differs from previous times. 
There are, of course, a lot of negative aspects of the changes that occurred, but a positive one that I’d like to point out is this situation of polyphony that we are facing. It is almost like in Dostoevsky’s novel, in fact, he describes it, it's like a more polyphonic situation. In the ‘80s or before, there were very few internationally working curators, and they had a lot of power, so whatever they decided was a good artist, that artist would show everywhere. I think that for our generation, it is different; many more curators are working all over, so there is no longer a monolithic figure of a curator with all-encompassing power to decide. Now, the question is much more of the network and of relations, exchange and dialogue. The curators of the ‘60s and ‘70s mostly decided exhibitions on their own; they would curate an exhibition and sign it, which is now less the case. There are very few exceptions, and one of them is certainly Kasper König, who collaboratively worked a lot. He worked with Glózer László for “Westkunst”, and also in other occasions we worked with co-curators and teams; so even I was invited by him to work together, first on the book and afterwards on the exhibition “Broken Mirror”, and I was very, very young at the time, practically I was starting and he co-curated this exhibition with me, who was from completely different generation. So he worked more with co-curators, which represents a kind of exception within his generation, because most curators did shows on their own, which I don’t consider negative. At that time, it was certainly right.
I don’t want to criticise that, but for our generation, it is a very different constellation, again related to the complexity, which is not only geographic but also in many ways. It has become much more common for curators to practice teamwork. I have very rarely curated a show on my own: the “Laboratorium” I did together with Barbara Vanderlinden, “Cities on the Move” with Hou Hanru, and, more recently, for “Utopia Station”, I’ve teamed up with artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and art historian Molly Nesbit. It is a bit like in music, when you are currently changing collaborations. So obviously, when I did Manifesta 1 or the Berlin Biennale, I also worked on a team of co-curators and co-curated these exhibitions. But recently, I’ve become increasingly interested in collaborating with artists as well as with people with a more scientific approach, as was the case with Tiravanija and Molly Nesbit in “Utopia Station”, and this kind of collaboration really underscores the complementarities of our approaches. The other thing is more transdisciplinary teamwork, such as for the show “Iconoclash”, which brought together Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel with a great number of scientists, architects, artists, and curators. For me, this was a trans-disciplinary curatorial experience in the real sense of the word. 

DD: How much does the element of critical interpretation of the artwork, movement, or certain artistic phenomena count for you?

HUO: What certainly plays the role is the idea of a monographic exhibition. After having worked a lot on group shows in the ‘90s and with the artists of my own generation who now have 10 years of work behind them, I believe it is a moment when it becomes interesting to work on bigger personal shows.
So the idea of interpretation can be addressed more complexly through a monographic show than in a group show. The group show is quite reductive, even though it has some important advantages, for instance: it can be a spark. We need the spark, we need the group shows. On the other hand, we need monographic shows which go in depth. For me, it is very important to work on monographic shows; therefore, together with Laurence Bossé and other colleagues, we are starting to organise one-person exhibitions, and I could name the following artists: Eliasson, Steve McQueen, Anri Sala and Philippe Parreno. 
In the case of these artists, we were interested in presenting earlier works to show them in the context of a museum retrospective, but also to create new situations and demonstrate how this practice is working today. This means to show, for example, with whom this artists collaborate: so we can see how Steve McQueen collaborates with NASA and drew a link with science; or in the case Anri Sala who is working now with music; or Philippe Parreno who is working with a scientist involved with virtual reality who wrote a program of the exhibition, or architect La Roche; so what Philippe did was - he wrote a kind of scenario for the exhibition in which also this collaborations played significant role.
It is very important to be able to show, in large-scale exhibitions, this complex situation in which the artist works. This complexity is part of the interpretative notion. When you pose things this way, you can also read previous works differently. 
So art has to do with both: broadening and going in depth; it is necessary to enlarge the vision, but also to deepen it. The curator has to do both. If I do only group shows, present new artists, and do research, it becomes too accelerated for me. So now I like this monograph very much, which slows down. It is about embracing this contradiction. Very often, after a group show, there is a desire to go deeper into one or two artists. That’s what happened with Eliasson, whom I showed for the first time at Manifesta 1 and then at the large-group Nordic show, “Nuit Blanches,” in 1996. After there was a desire to go more in-depth, to do something bigger, we came up with a monographic show where we exhibited practice and works in the context of other works.

DD: You interviewed a great number of artists, architects, curators, and theoreticians, as well as scientists, etc. Is there any system, or does it just depend on the encounters?  What are the parameters that make you choose or decide who to interview?

HUO: Now, the Interview project looks like a complex dynamic system, but there was no master plan in the beginning. I didn’t decide in the early ‘90s that I was going to be an interviewer. It just happened. Initially, I had discussions, and later, I always regretted that there was no trace left. I could have a wonderful conversation with an artist, but then there was no document, nothing to maintain memory or the possibility of returning to certain issues. So I thought that it would be important to record these discussions somehow. At the same time, Museum in Progress invited me to conduct interviews in a TV studio, and one of the first was with Vito Acconci. This was for me a very important experience. Still, I realised that the TV studio is quite an intimidating setting, and it tends to generate dialogue that comes out rather formally. So I thought it would be nicer to do it in cafés or other places, while I’m travelling, in planes and trains – independent of where we are – for interviews in inter-spatial situations, on the move. First, I recorded sound, but later, when a small digital camera came out, I used that because you can just put it anywhere and forget about it.
I also started interviewing some artists more in depth since David Silvester’s interviews have very inspired me with Frances Bacon, and Pierre Cabanne's interviews with Marcel Duchamp. I like the idea that someone talks with artists really a lot, and at the end you have a whole series of interviews with someone, and it’s very interesting to read it with a certain time distance. If I want to know about Bacon, I read Silvester, or if I want to read about Duchamp, I take Cabanne. So, on the heels of this, I started doing some really long interviews with artists. At the same time, I have been asked to conduct interviews for the catalogues, which means I have commissioned them. In a certain way, I was making many links to architecture and design because these fields were always closely connected to my main questions: the question of exhibition, the question of connection to the visual art field. Of course, it is very clear that I am the exhibition curator whose base is the art world, and that most of my work takes place within this frame. So it is not about interviewing people from all kinds of disciplines at random, but always about the questions that come up in conversations with artists at exhibitions. For instance, last week we spoke a lot with Philippe Parreno about the real and about the exhibition “Les Immateriaux” of Lyotard. He kept bringing up Clement Roussell, so we decided to contact the philosopher and talk with him. I could mail you the text Philippe wrote for the interview book…

DD: Are you thinking about the evolution of the “Interview” project?

HUO: That’s actually an important thing about this project – the fact that it is a long-term project, and even if it has been going on for seven or eight years, it is just at the beginning. As long as I’m working, I will continue the interview project too, because it is changing all the time. I have now been asked by Domus magazine to do one interview per month, which will be published as a small book within the magazine. It is like a Russian Matryoshka, only here we will have a small book within a magazine, which I think is interesting because people can take an interview book out of Domus and build a collection. Obviously, I will produce new interviews for every issue.
On the other hand, there is the idea of continuing the volumes. Also, there are all these films, so one can think of a sort of future website. I use a lot of digital recordings in my classes at IUAV in Venice; I show them to students, and I find they work very well in the classroom. It is like having lectures by different artists each time. And it is not just one lecture – it is a polyphony. This notion of polyphony leads me to another point: I’m currently working on expanding this restrained form of dialogue, in which I talk to one artist. Now it is becoming more and more open to three or more participants: for example, Philippe Parreno and I have been in Poland, where we interviewed Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel prize winner who is now about ninety years old, or urbanist Oscar Hansen, who is also an important figure, even though there is not much material about his work. In these cases, we made a trialogue. With Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, I’m also recording different conversations, or with Rem Koolhaas… so I’m working on this change, and one interview leads to the next in almost a natural way. It is like a chain, but the choice is not random. Each interview is related to those recurrent questions that we are interested to explore: the exhibition, which has to do with the trans-disciplinarity and quest how to link art to architecture, also it has to do with demand how to produce a reality, how basically art can produce a reality, and than of course it addresses notion of utopia and question of unrealised projects. In this, I see that the curator’s role can have a significant part: I think if it can do something, curating can make an unrealised project actually happen. It is a necessity to find out what artists really want to do and then make it happen. Not the other way around: not what the curator wants to do, but what the artist wants, and then help make it realisable.
In all my interviews, I ask about unrealised projects. I’m always asking whether utopia is still capable of playing a role; can it be used… We could imagine taking out just the questions about utopia from my hundreds of interviews, editing them, and making a book that would collect all unrealised artistic projects. So the ways of how these materials can be edited are infinite…

DD: But interviews are also a way to get “first-hand” information…

HUO: Yes, it connects with the idea of research. I have conducted systematic research in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America; I've been in Brazil and am planning to go to Argentina and Chile. All interviews have been an important part of this research process, which might start with my encounters with younger artists, whom I’d also ask about their heroes and points of reference. In this way, I could come to the information about certain persons whose work is not yet highlighted. That just happened to me in Poland: I’d talk with young artists about their influences, as well as with some curators, such as Joanna Mytkowska from Foksal – and they would mention this old man Oskar Hansen, who is almost forgotten, and so we would go to visit him and talk to him… For me, it's important to stay focused on the research. The problem with curating research is that one travels too fast; from my experience, I concluded that sometimes it is better to go to fewer places many times to go in-depth than to go to many places quickly. I see that the Interview project is about digging, about going deeper. 
My main idea for the interview project, and the historical necessity I see in it, is that we are facing a kind of loss of memory. We are living in an environment of increased amnesia about the experiments of the XX century, all those different Modernities. It is still important to look at them, to understand them as toolboxes. Just as I was saying before, through the example of Oskar Hansen, it was important to interview this man alongside Parreno, just as it is important for the future to break this expanding amnesia by providing more material for our toolboxes. It is incredible that, even though all younger artists think he is really a hero, it’s not possible to find a single image of him on the net. Another case is that of Cedric Price. Dan Graham was telling me a lot about him as well as many other artists and friends, he was teacher of Rem Koolhaas, he is one of key figures of architecture of XX century, but when I met him some years ago, hardly anybody from the architectural world ever saw him; there was no book on him… so I just did a book on him that came out. 
I would like to make a contribution to break this horrendous amnesia, because it is really one of the scariest things right now. We have to deal with the phenomenon of short-term memory loss in an increasingly accelerated environment. That’s also why it is important not to leave the argument of memory to the enemy. There are people in preservation and right-wing politics who talk about the importance of memory, but they take a static approach. I think it is very important to show other ways how to deal with memory and, of course, not to forget all those radical and fantastic experiments of the past. I made a trip to Brazil with Stefano Boeri. We interviewed Oskar Neemayer and Lygia Pape, who were the same generation as Oiticica. We got in touch with memory and experiments firsthand, and I think that is one of the leading parts of my ongoing project.

DD: If you look backwards, would you say there is a project, an exhibition, that you consider particularly significant for your career, or for your own path? 

HUO: For me, it is very difficult to speak about the notion of career, because the career means, at the same time, some planning, and for me, things have always happened in a way. It has never been planned in a linear way. I started with the exhibition in my kitchen. Then it became an exhibition in a living room. Then the exhibition on a mountain, then in a monastery, then in a Nietzsche house, and then I started curating in a museum, in a big museum in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, where I developed the program “Migrateurs”. Then I became involved in larger exhibitions and biennales, while continuing my small projects. Also, I developed concepts of a book as an exhibition and a magazine as an exhibition. For me, there has never been a hierarchy but a flux: one thing led to the other, and it always came from conversations with artists and from my research, which I am carrying on in many different cities. For me, it was a necessity to do shows; it wasn’t about the career in the sense of planning, but it is about self-organisation and allowing things to happen because this is, I think, a very open field.
Retrospectively, the most satisfying so far are those experiences in which exhibitions developed their own life. There is a lifelike quality in them, in their being a complex, dynamic system with many feedback loops, as a learning system. Certainly, that was the case with the Do It! experience, which, as I already pointed out, began with a conversation with artists Bertrand Lavier and Christian Boltanski. Do it came out from the idea of instructions in art – manuals, receipts, those things that have a very, very long history in art, from Duchamp and his “Unhappy Ready Mades”, to László Moholy-Nagy who for the first time asked his work to be done over the telephone, instructions of John Cage, Fluxus till Yoko Ono, are this pioneers of the idea of instruction as an art work. We were discussing with Lavier and Boltanski that it would be interesting to mount an exhibition based solely on these instructions. At the beginning, we invited ten or twelve artists to make a recipe, which we then translated into many languages. Museums then realised it, and the artist list remained open, so I continued my research and, over time, invited new artists to join the project. This has been evolving for over eight years and has taken place in about 60 cities. It was also realised in a TV version and an online version on e-flux (www.e-flux.com). This is a project that will never end; it can be more active and then less active, but it is moving on, as is the research that I continue to do. This is a time-based exhibition, so a new version is realised now and then. Artists who participated have dozens of slides of their work in different contexts and cities, with varying levels of exposure. That’s something we also tried to build into “Cities on the Move”. The forces of globalisation are so active in art, and there is a very big danger that homogenising powers take over. Today, exhibitions often travel from one place to another, almost like packages. I have been interested in ways of making a group show as tool of research - James Clifford, the anthropologist describes for anthropology this process - the travelling show becomes a research-related, it is necessity for a research and it has to do with knowledge production: exhibition produces a knowledge on its way; not an exhibition which is product that is shipped around, but a laboratory which is evolved in every single further step. That is exactly what we tried to do with “Cities on the Move”: we had an exhibition on Asian art, architecture and urbanism where we were asking what the future of the city is, the present condition of the city and amazing art and architecture which has been created in Asian cities in the ‘90s. We saw the city as a laboratory, and we wanted to use this space so that the exhibition actually becomes a city. It started in Secession in Vienna, and then, from there, it took a completely different form each time. The exhibition was never the same twice. Each time we asked another artist and another architect to design the exhibition together with other participants. The artists and architects met, again and again, in different cities and under different circumstances: from Vienna to Helsinki, to London… and along the way, they sparked many conversations, and the artists themselves created many evolving pieces. This was the case of “Cities on the Move”, and on the other hand we had similar starting points with “Laboratorium” and also with “Utopia Station”; this too are on-going research projects, that responds to a fact that in accelerated environment curator don’t have more than six months to do a research, so we can parallel do a research and let it tour for few years. 

DD: Is there any show or project by other curators that you would consider very significant for the ‘90s?

HUO: Let me first answer your previous question better. For me, the exhibition is only one way of working with artists, but not the only one. I’m also working on different types of conferences. Several of these events I might mention: “Coffee Breaks” which are like research meetings where artists meet, moments in which one stops to produce but think, and then projects such as: “Laboratorium” to a certain extent, and than “Bridge the Gap” in Centre for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu, Japan, and “Art and Brain” that I organised in the mid ‘90s together with brain scientist Dr. Ernst Pöppel to focus on this very complicated relationship between art and science, that usually in the exhibitions fails to become a mutually illustrative mode, so through conversations we tried to develop really a dialogue between art and science. So what I want to say is that the exhibition is just one way of working with artists, and there are also conferences where I try to change the rules of the game. Then, very important are also the books, editing, working with artists, and publishing have a very important role, as well as editing the magazine, such as “Point d’Ironie", supported by Agnes b., where we invited artists to do a project having a carte blanche, which is a kind of exhibition in printed matter. I edited a series of books for Walther König, starting from the point that, as much as there exists a sort of amnesia about curating, there is also a big neglect of artists' writings, which I consider one of the most fascinating ways of getting to know about one artist’s work: through his/her own writings. I started editing artists' writings, first with Gerhard Richter, Gilbert & George, Louise Bourgeois, Leon Golub and John Baldessari. So, besides conversations, there is also this editing work that is very important for me. One might ask what these conversations really mean, and there was an interesting talk in Venice in which Rem Koolhaas discussed curating, conversations, intimacy, interviews, and community. So it’s not only about exhibitions but all these projects have in common that they try to produce community, in the sense that Giorgio Agamben wrote, as “upcoming community”, or producing community that is bonding and intersecting different sorts of knowledge and intelligences. Koolhaas said that each conversation doubles or produces strolling references to other forms of intelligence, beauty, or professionalism. There is a notion, a “entrapped notion of venturing,” in other cultures or other disciplines, which, according to Koolhaas, is also related to the low esteem of a small nation, which I think facilitates a certain anthropological stance. So you know me, being from Switzerland, which is a very small country, and Rem Koolhaas being from the Netherlands, I think there is something of this, maybe, in our activity. Community-building phenomena actually link the exhibitions, the conferences, the “Coffee Breaks”- type events, the books, etc.

But to come to your other question about the exhibitions I have been inspired by… well, obviously it would be the exhibition of Lyotard, “Les Immateriaux”, that, even if it was too early for me to see it when I started curating, was still very strongly resonating in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It was the exhibition with unexpected curatorship and, on the other hand, the exhibition that really bridged the pool of knowledge and went beyond to other fields; pooling knowledge is a very, very interesting example. 
Also, I find “L'Hiver de l'amour / Winter of love” a very inspiring exhibition curated by Helen Fleiss, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Jean-Luc Vilmouth. I think it was in ’94, and I find it particularly interesting also from the point of view of artists dealing with curatorship, as in the case of Dominique and Vilmouth. That was also very interesting for me to observe at the Biennale in Venice with Tiravanija and Orozco. On the other hand, I’m very inspired by museums, and that’s my big unrealised project so far: thinking about how the museum of the 21st century would have to function; it would have to use or produce calculated uncertainty and constant incompleteness to catalyse invigorating change. 
I’ve been inspired, of course, by many existing museums, but that leads into your question about exhibitions… Exhibitions which really, really have shocked me, and it was so maybe also because I saw it very early, already in my high-school years, were the exhibitions in Kunsthaus Zurich curated by Harald Szeemann. One thing that struck me for sure was “Gesamtkunstwerk – In Search of Total Art Work” in 1983, in which Szeemann was dealing with the notion of utopia and in which he collected different approaches, from the architecture of Gaudy to the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, to Kurt Schwitters and his Mertzbau, till Beuys and his notion of total art work. It wasn’t really the exhibition of artworks but principally the exhibition of ideas, so that was a trigger, and I spent about ten afternoons in this exhibition, being there watching and learning the catalogue almost by heart. So for some years, it was a powerful experience. And the other was the exhibition of Mario Merz “Città irreale” in 1985, which was a totally incredible moment when, in a very big space, without any dividing walls, Merz built with his igloos a utopic city, or something between village and city, using big and small igloos that formed a sort of conglomerate… That exhibition was also a big shock!
But there were a lot of exhibitions; more recently, I might mention “Aperto” of ’93, or some of its parts, like the empty box of Orozco and the presence of Gonzalez-Torres. I mean, a lot of artists and curators of our generation emerged on the international scene there for the first time, just like Cattelan or Rirkrit. That was important, less as a show but more as a gathering, maybe.
The list might be long, but apart from exhibitions, I’d also like to point out the activity of Portikus during the ‘90s as a sort of inspiration and role model, even if it is a smaller exhibition space, which is also an important aspect. It is not necessary to have these very, very large spaces, but sometimes it is vital to have a small, concentrated space. There was a sentence in Mario Merz's work quoting this Vietnamese general: "When you lose concentration, you win territory; and vice versa, when you win concentration, you lose territory." So I think that this very tiny, concentrated space of Portikus really developed an extraordinary program, within which we also find this trans-generational momentum, which I think is very important. I have always applied myself to my work, too. I always considered this link very important: not just to work with artists of my own generation, but also to make links with artists of previous generations. So in Portikus, you could have exhibitions of Nam June Paik or Dieter Roth, which have now been discovered in a great way, but there he was shown in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, or you could rediscover the work of Hans-Peter Feldmann, who is also a big hero. I see the activity of Portikus almost as one exhibition, as a series of sequences within a show, because of its concentration and coherence. 

DD: Sounds very interesting, this idea of the upcoming community? Could you focus more on that… on this aspect of “creating a community” throughout the exhibition?

HUO: I can give you another concrete example: together with Hou Hanru, Chinese artist and curator, we did “Cities on the Move”, having as the point of departure an idea to make the exhibition an engine, as an epistemological engine. This means we wanted to create an exhibition with an evolutionary character, adding new research dimensions each time we present it in a new city. The practice of the artists and architects in the course of the “Cities on the Move” was influenced by the fact that they would meet again and again, but every time in a different city, and that’s also why their pieces could develop some changes. They started to know each other rather well because they met seven or eight times. The exhibition sparked many collaborations between artists and architects across Asia, so you’d have an artist from Kuala Lumpur working with an architect from Shanghai, and so on. For example, the exhibition prompted the realisation that Xai Ko Xeng and Chang Yung Ho are building a museum together… The idea that I like is to trigger things that go far beyond the exhibition. That is something very important that a group can fulfil.

DD: Coming back to themes that have taken more recent shape in your work, why do you think it is important to deal with the notion of Utopia now?

HUO:  With group shows and with team shows, I very much mistrust this idea of the theme, which narrows things down, because then artists and artworks are just there to prove the thesis of the curator; they function more as illustration. For me, it is very problematic, and the artwork is just a kind of sample. For me, the themes which work for exhibition are like triggers, like catalysts. For example, with “Cities on the Move” we found such catalyst, the city is very open notion, and even if now is very used, almost overused for the exhibition, at the time was still quite new; and there were a lot of artists in Asia working in this extreme conditions using a city as a medium or as a trigger for their work. The theme was broad enough to go in many directions. With Utopia is pretty much the same. We started dealing with this notion in a seminar in Venice, but even before that, I spoke a great deal about utopia with many artists during the ‘90s. It was actually revealed to be a highly problematic notion. It was probably more present in architecture than in the visual arts, even if artists such as Liam Gillick and Pierre Huyghe spoke extensively about utopia. So we thought it would be an interesting theme for a seminar, and together with Stefano Boeri, we initiated it at the IUAV to, in a way, bridge the gap between architecture and visual arts. This seminar continues, and in a winter semester, we have joint sessions where Boeri’s architecture students come to my classes, and my students and I go to architecture classes. Soon after, we started inviting Molly Nesbit regularly, who introduced this Adorno/Bloch debate: when Bloch was pushed to the wall to define what utopia is for him, it turned out that utopia could be defined as something that is missing. So we started with the observation that utopia is becoming increasingly unclear, as if it had gone missing. So I thought it would be interesting to work on the theme that has actually gone missing, that in itself has become a no-place, an empty rhetorical quest, or, as Molly calls it, “a desert island of cliché”. When I interviewed Iranian film director Kiarostami, he told me that we should refuse a long-term perspective on utopia, and he argued strongly for fixing methods in the present. So after the seminars, we thought, together with Molly and Rirkrit, that it would be interesting to settle somewhere in the middle ground between the island and a hill, and so we decided that could be the station. Basically, Kiarostami’s question, “Where is a friend's house?”, kept us from settling too comfortably into the station. Out of this seminar, where we invited artists like Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten Höller, and Olafur Eliasson every week, came conversations far before the biennale, which we continued to organise through gatherings and informal meetings between artists and architects at the college where Molly Nesbit teaches, and on some other occasions. So artists really met many times and discussed among themselves. I think that a big problem with biennale and similar kinds of exhibitions on a large scale is that they are like going shopping, basically, take this piece and take that piece, you have to travel around very fast… and that’s something I’ve done several times for other biennales, but it’s just not so satisfying. It doesn’t lead really anywhere; it is a sort of redundancy. So now, it is actually some anti-shopping, or non-shopping, attitude that was at the core of this project, and where the artists I invited developed longer-term projects, bigger than just a spectacle, bigger than just one event. Many of the projects that you see in Venice have been really developed by the artists, like Anri Sala’s project with the Mayor of Tirana, or Agnes Varda's project “Patatutopia”, or the way Rirkrit Tiravanija collaborated with Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno on the exhibition design. These were developed long before the Biennale project started. 
And to come back to your question, “why Utopia?” At the general level, it’s not only that it's open enough to be a trigger and not too closed a situation, but also that there are many conceptual advantages: it invokes the social contract of some kind for the arts and ménages to be a catalyst for social change. I’ve used a lot of this notion of catalyst in relation to curating, and I think, like a catalyst, it has always tended to be scarified at a certain moment that maybe one can go beyond it; the theme has only been a trigger. But I think that things have to be presented very concretely, individually, in particular. That’s why the station is, as I see it, a concrete utopia; it’s a case study, it’s an accumulation of individual contributions and not some theoretical abstract question of utopia. I hope at least that it’s very real, very concrete. 
Rirkrit Tiravanija has designed stations also before, and I think that this concept allowed us to work at once at several starting points; it envisions the space as a kind of, how it came out in Venice, division of different layers of vision and of activity: some faster, some slower, some more performative, some more meditative. The project evolves with each contribution that we receive. To make this more concrete, one can also look at the performance program, which has happened during the opening days and will continue at certain weekends in July, September, and October. 
For the opening weekend there have been many daily on-going performances: the Church of Fear, the seven-days performance of Christoph Schlingenseif, the Shimabuku, the Japanese artist that was flying kites, Andreas Slominski who walked down the space of Arsenale during the opening days undressing down, there was Zerynthia, Franz West mobile radio which actually had many guests and produced also a book, there was an architectural performance of Martha Rosler with Oleanna group and FLEAS. There was an Agnes Varda performance giving potato soup in front of the potato shack, which is a triple video installation, and this was the first time that this artist, in more than forty-five years of her career, did something in the art context. There was a recycling utopia performance by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren, which related to Yoko Ono’s “n-utopia” project, and John Lennon’s “no-cards-project”. Something that Liam Gillick pointed out and that is very important: that we shouldn’t just have check list of the works, but make clear that somebody did the structure, that some artists worked on the exhibition display, and display features and structure, which is Liam with his round benches, which are as conversation pieces: one can sit down and have a conversation, but also could use them when event happens, these are the different functions; or you have Philippe Parreno’s handles, or roof of Carey Young. Then some artists did works or events, unpredictable events like the one of Julius Koller, or invisible events like the one of Pierre Huyghe, that took place when there was no public, just a few friends. It was some flying cosmic city, a project that was a kind of rumour, or there was Karl Holmqvist, who was a master of ceremonies, inaugurating the space every morning, putting it in a sort of right-energy mode. 
If we talk more about the structure, we had the last space of Arsenale, the one in which, on the previous biennale, Richard Serra did, one could say a very large monographic or more monolithic gesture, with Kabakov next to it. 
This time, we had a very big installation by Rirkrit basically. Still, it wasn’t a monolithic or monographic gesture; it was much more an open gesture that invites many others to plug in. I would say it is more of a plug-in gesture than a monolithic one. This is one of the biggest pieces Tiravanija realised: a fifty-meter-long wooden platform, a kind of stage with doors through which one could enter different spaces. These doors lead us to different forms of utopia. In front of the doors, there’s a sort of catwalk where people can walk, where performances can take place, or where posters can be hung, since we invited 150 artists to design a poster for the occasion. There is also a poster wall in the garden, a kiosk, or billboards in the city. “Utopia Station” is also very strong in its online dimension, with very close collaboration with e-flux on the exhibition's internet presence. There are also some more plug-ins to Rirkrit’s station, such as “Sonic House” by Uglycute, where all kinds of events can take place, including a concert of Patty Smith in September, or more intimate events like Bruno Latour’s lecture. Station hosts events and transforms itself from a concert hall to a projection room to a conference stage. It is not always the same, but the structure changes depending on the type of event. Apart this exterior aspect there is also the fact that through the doors one might enter more silent spaces, more meditative ones, where you have for example the “Church” of Tacita Dean: actually the alabaster window of Arsenale; then there is a singing performance by Tino Sehgal: every time one enters the door a performer starts to sing; but also there are film projections like the one of Anri Sala on Tirana’s Mayor Edi Rama who coloured all the city, so that in a way revisits urban utopias of the twenties; and there is a drawing cabinet with drawings of Rem Koolhaas, Isozaki and Yona Friedman; there is the sculpture of Iñaki Bonillas where the temperature is always kept the same – it is a sort of utopic space where the temperature is never changing throughout the year; then there is a big installation by Rodney Graham about the black square of Malevich; or the Eliasson’s work of inscribing Utopia that basically represents his idea that you can’t impose utopia to anyone anymore and that Utopia is in our head, that it is a kind of subjective matter. Also, there is no linear path, but each visitor can design their own way through the show and the part situated in the garden. Apart from the other projects in the garden that I have already mentioned, there is a significant project by Alisia Framis, linked to the idea of the land. 
To come back to certain things we talked about before, connected to the previous question that you asked and to bring things in relation to that: you asked about the exhibitions that influenced or inspired me most through the ‘90s – one could draw it till now, to the more recent period. Interestingly, there are two projects curated by artists that inspired me more than anything and that I think are absolutely incredible. Both are models for the 21st century: “AnnLee” by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, and “The Land” by Rirkrit Tiravanija. These projects are, in a way, close to Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster”, considering the time dimension: they span several years and are not limited to the art world's time frame. The artists impose their own time. 
“The Land” by Rirkrit Tiravanija is a project developed in Thailand, where he, together with another Thai artist, Chang Mai, took a piece of land and gave it to other artists to build houses. It doesn’t have a normative dimension in which artists have to say how to live, but it is a much more subjective utopia that is independent of the art world's structure and also, somehow, independent of its time frame. The project is not about the property; a group of students from Chang Mai in the local village I am involved with is harvesting after cultivation using the traditional Thai farming technique. All the participants share this, and this extends all of Tiravanija’s previous initiatives that engaged objects and actions of everyday life, demonstrating how far contemporary artistic production today exceeds the boundaries of the autonomous object and the art system. “The Land” initiated not only to cause the structures to be designed, built and used by artists – but it is a very big artist’s run space or artist’s run time in which Tiravanija’s assignment to collaborate, or offer to other artists possibilities to go beyond their disciplines and to construct works they might otherwise never imagined or not even dared to do. Many artists involved already in Venice are also working there, developing a lot of housing projects: Atelier Van Lieshout worked on a toilet system, Alisia Framis on a house, Fischli & Weiss are building a utopic bus stop inspired by Oskar Neemayer, Superflex, a Danish collective, is also working on the system for the production of biogas… Rirkrit Tiravanija himself is contributing by building a house structured as follows: a communal space for gatherings and exchanges, a reading and meditation space, and a sleeping space. I just spoke today with Rirkrit, who is now in Thailand together with Philippe Parreno, building a plug-in station, a hyper plug-in which functions with biotechnology using satellite and live elephant for the necessary power. So “The Land” shows us this spirit of collaboration, but at the same time, the importance of being not connected to anything. And that is very interesting. It resists many of the normative and prescriptive aspects that accompany earlier utopias. It is a self-imposed utopia. Another one that I find very interesting is Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe's “AnnLee” project, which started from the idea of finding a new way of working together, a way they have also been developing throughout the ‘90s. In this project, Parreno invited many artists to make a film about the figure of Ann Lee. It was actually a group show at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. This kind of project does not underestimate curatorial invention, but I believe many of the really interesting exhibitions throughout the 20th century were curated by artists. I think that in those cases, the curator shouldn’t stand in the way but should facilitate things, allowing the exhibitions to function as platforms for these self-organisations. It is a bit like in a Chinese city, or like a state which comes after planning, Cedric Wise talked about no-plan, or about self-organisation; according to me, exhibitions should allow such constellations. 

DD: Relating to “The Land”, you said that it’s interesting that it is cut out from anything, any temporal dimension, art world included… would explain better what the aspects that you are appreciating are?

HUO: I think it is also very related – I mean, many of these projects are financed through exhibitions: for instance, the exhibition in Stockholm curated by Maria Lind has produced houses by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tobias Rehberger, which were sent to the “Land”. Now, Philippe Parreno produced “Reality”, since he is working on this idea of how the film can produce reality; we actually have the situation where the film produces the building in a certain way (the artist made a film, and for that film a building was built, so you might say that the film produced reality). The building is now in “The Land”. So basically, the interesting thing is that the Land is like a Weissenhof of the 21st century, it is a kind of concrete utopia, not a normative utopia, which you had in a Weissenhof situation. In this case, it is an open form; Oskar Hansen would call it that. So I think “The Land” is an open form in which many different artists are invited to do a building, or better, one might say that different artists that are invited to do something, react in a different way to the Land – some do houses, others do more services, like Superflex or Fischli & Weiss. So it's like an open form in which different things can happen. An interesting aspect is that this project has another temporality than a single exhibition; it can go on for ten or twenty years more; it has actually just begun.
Personally, I am very interested in those artistic projects that go beyond the temporality of the exhibition – of a Biennial, of a Documenta, of a museum exhibition, of an art fair or a gallery show… 
I like the artists' projects that have their own temporality – like Yang Fudong’s “The Seven Intellectuals”, which is a film that he will develop for five years. On the occasion of biennales or similar large manifestations, the artist is showing single chapters, as we could see in Venice and, recently, in Miami, where he showed another chapter… The project itself is bigger than the exhibition time lapse. We can find this kind of approach in the projects of Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, or Rirkrit Tiravanija, or Matthew Barney. Here, you have an example of an artist who defines a different horizon of time, constructing their own temporality. In the time like this we are living, where the forces of globalisation and homogenisation are influencing art world in incising manner, it is very important to introduce the idea that artists can resist this, not only by the production of space, by proposing heterogeneous spaces, but also through possibility and willingness of proposing new temporalities which resist homogenised temporalities of the increasingly co-modified exhibition tours and packaging of group shows. 

DD: When you did interviews with artists and other people, you would ask about their imaginary or unrealised projects. Do you have one?

HUO: Yes, of course, I have several unrealised exhibitions, but there is one I regretted very much that it couldn’t happen. That is a project that I wanted to co-curate with American artist Nancy Spero. In the '93/’94 we thought that it would be really interesting to curate a show for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum, where they would usually do the exhibitions of Yves Saint Laurent and designers like that. We thought that it would be really interesting to make a sort of anti-fashion exhibition, “Clothing of Survival”, and we developed the entire project around this idea, but the Costume Institute turned it down. 
And my big unrealised project is an exhibition I want to do about all artists' projects that haven’t been realised to date, so, of course, it would only be possible through the book.