Publisher: Sterberg Press, ISBN: 9781933128252, Author: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Format: Softcover, 128 x 198 mm, 208pp
Sixteen art practitioners have asked everything you ever wanted to know about curator Hans Ulrich Obrist but were afraid to ask in this book. Spanning the beginning of his “career” as a young curator in his Zurich kitchen to his most recent engagement as the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs, and as Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating is a attempt at pinning down the work of this peripatetic curator.
Obrist adheres to to most existing conventions of interaction but he actively seeks to find and invent new modalities for engaging with art. Exploring and molding his own subjectivity, he practices a quasi-situationist approach in his curations. This book provides an insight into his psychogeography and motivations across sixteen interviews.
In a sense, it organises a “protest against forgetting” and affirms the sagacity of an artist who told this dont-stop 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.