Nicolas Bourriaud

Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a French curator, theoretician and writer. He recently founded the curatorial cooperative Radicants. He was also founder and director of Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo), gathering the La Panacée art center, the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and Hôtel des Collections. Bourriaud was director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris from 2011 to 2015; Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London from 2007 to 2010; and founder advisor for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv, Ukraine. He also founded and co-directed Palais de Tokyo, Paris, between 1999 and 2006.  He is author of the landmark publication Relational Aesthetics, which was published in 1998 and is still inspirational today for many artists, curators and art professionals worldwide. His most recent essay, Inclusions. Aesthetics of the capitalocene (2020), has been published in English by Sternberg Press. 

Bourriaud’s curated exhibitions include The 7th continent, Istanbul Biennial (2019), Turkey; Crash Test – The Molecular Turn, La Panacée (2018) and Back to Mulholland Drive, La Panacée (2017), Montpelier, France; Wirikuta, MECA Aguascalientes, Mexico (2016); The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial (2014), Taiwan; The Angel of History, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2013); Monodrome, Athens Biennial (2011), Greece; and Altermodern, Tate Triennial, London (2009), among others. Bourriaud was also on the curatorial team of the first and second Moscow Biennials in 2005 and 2007. 

Photo by Sergio Rosales Medina