A former member of the curatorial team of Documenta 14 and currently associated with the University of Chicago, Dieter Roelstraete will look back upon the adventure of helping organise the largest exhibition of contemporary art ever mounted from the point of view of his ongoing interest in art’s entanglement in the so-called knowledge economy, the sprawling art-as-research nexus, and the art system’s margins, peripheries and general “outside”. His reflections on curatorial practice — that of his peers as much as his own — from the early 2000s to the present will be filtered through the lens of two important anniversaries celebrated in 2017 — that of the October Revolution and Martin Luther’s “95 theses”.
Dieter Roelstraete is an internationally renowned curator of contemporary art, previously a curator of documenta14 and from 2017 curator of Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago. Prior to his work with documenta 14, he served as the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 2012 to 2015. From 2003 to 2011 Roelstraete was a curator at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, where he organized large-scale group exhibitions as well as monographic shows. Roelstraete has published a great number of catalogue texts, magazine articles in Artforum, Art Review, e-flux, frieze, Metropolis M, Mousse, Magazine, Parkett, Texte zur Kunst about contemporary art and philosophy.
This program is made possible by funding from the Baltic-American Freedom Foundation (BAFF), Estonian Cultural Endowment, Estonian Academy of Science.
Recorded by Tõnis Jürgens at the Academy of Sciences.