For this panel discussion, three curators from museums and art centres are invited to discuss their curatorial practices and share their experiences and perspectives.
Moderators: Nathalie Hénon / Jean-François Rettig – Directors of Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin.
Participants:
– Eliel Jones
Curator, performance and time-based media – KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium
– Lara Khaldi
Artistic director, De Apple Amsterdam, Netherlands
– Jonathan Pouthier
Conservation attaché at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, in charge of programming the film collection, Paris, France.
The title given to this panel discussion, ‘Will Museums and Art Centres Disappear?’, is deliberately somewhat provocative, but above all calls for reflection on the reasons why these places remain more necessary and significant than ever.
So, while Ito Steyerl asked in 2013 ‘Is the Museum a Battlefield?’ and identified the museum as an essential place for critical articulation in our contemporary societies, it more likely that, in the decades to come, museums and contemporary art venues will be nothing more than fields of ruins? At a time when our era is marked by a plurality of crises – democratic, climatic, ecological – and by the rise of populism and the far right, which tend to instrumentalise culture by reducing it to a partisan function dissociated from the common good, a central question arises: will places
of contemporary art and culture still have meaning in a world marked by these collapses? The answer is undoubtedly yes, but it requires us to re-examine the conditions of their necessity, their stakes and their relevance.
One of the guiding ideas of this year’s project in Amsterdam is what Roland Barthes expressed in his inaugural address at the Collège de France in 1977, entitled How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday. There, he explores the possibility of a singular form of sociability, in which the independence of the individual coexists with a sense of collective belonging — the dream of a life both free and shared, without alienation from a discourse. Barthes described this perspective as utopian, but the tension it expresses remains at the heart of our questions: how can we make art venues critical and hospitable spaces, capable of articulating both autonomy
and the common?
It is this tension that we would like to explore with the participants, focusing on their practices, experiences and perspectives, aiming to share a common reflection on the future of contemporary art venues.
Biography of Eliel Jones
Eliel Jones -Curator, performance and time-based media – KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium
Eliel Jones’ research interests and methodologies stem from intersectional approaches to queer and feminist discourse and are guided by his involvement in direct community action and solidarity. Prior to KANAL he was the Curator of the 2nd Brent Biennial, which took place across 12 venues in Northwest London. He has also held curatorial positions at Metroland Cultures, Cell Project Space and Chisenhale Gallery (all in London), where he worked towards realising multidisciplinary commissions by emerging artists including Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Hannah Black, Lydia Ourahmane, Paul Maheke, Krzysztof Baginski and Jose Funnell, amongst others. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic he curated ‘Queer Correspondence’, a mail-art initiative that reached nearly 1000 subscribers in 42 countries through monthly letter-sized commissioned projects by artists and writers. His independent curatorial projects include: Gelare Khosghozaran, ‘To Be the Author of One’s Own Travels’, Delfina Foundation, London; ‘do you host?’, Ujazdowski Castle CCA, Warsaw; ‘Acts of Translation’, Mohammed and Mahera Abu Ghazaleh Foundation, Jordan; and ‘Experiments on Public Space’, Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. Jones has written criticism on contemporary art and performance for various international platforms, including e-flux, Frieze, Artforum, The Guardian, Flash Art, Mousse and X-TRA, and has contributed to over a dozen publications. He is a faculty member of the Curatorial Studies postgraduate programme at KASK School of Art & Conservatorium in Gent; a visiting tutor of De Ateliers in Amsterdam and curator of OFFSPRING 2025; and a Trustee of PEER in London..
Biography of Lara Khaldi
Lara Khaldi – Artistic director, De Apple Amsterdam, Netherlands
Lara Khaldi is a cultural worker based between Palestine and Netherlands. She was a member of the
curatorial team of documenta fifteen/Lumbung (2019-2022) and has been working as artistic director of de Appel, Amsterdam since January 2023.
She has curated exhibitions and projects such as School of Intrusions, Educational Platform with Noor Abed (2020-ongoing); Overtone: On the Politics of Listening, Goethe Institute, Ramallah (2019); Unweaving Narratives, Palestinian Museum, Birzeit (2018); Shifting Ground, Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); Maria Thereza Alves: Possible Reversal, KSCC, Ramallah (2017); Untranslatability with Eszter Szakács, Off Biennial, Budapest (2017); Jerusalem Shows V & VI (2011 and 2012), Al Ma’mal Art Foundation, Jerusalem.
Khaldi has taught at several art programs; between 2017 and 2019 she worked as a visiting lecturer and head of department of the Media Studies program at Al Quds-Bard College, Jerusalem. Khaldi was also a tutor on the Disarming Design MA program, at Sandberg Institute, 2020-2022. She was deputy director of programs at Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, (2009-2011) and held various positions there since 2006. From 2019 to 2022 she was a curatorial member of the artistic team of documenta fifteen, and has been working with the practice of lumbung which "enables an alternative economy of collectivity, shared resource building, and equitable distribution.
Biography of Jonathan Pouthier
Jonathan Pouthier, Conservation attaché at the Musée national;art moderne – Centre Pompidou, in charge of programming the film collection, Paris, France
Jonathan Pouthier graduated from La Fémis, the French National School for Film and Sound Professions.
Since 2011, he has been a curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris, where he is responsible for programming the film collection. He is the author of numerous articles on the
relationship between film and the visual arts, including “Objet mental. Film, projection et interférences”; (in ;Philippe Decrauzat. Delay", Walther König, 2022);”David Claerbout. The Silence of the Lens”; (Hannibal Books, 2022), and “L’histoire d’une histoire du cinéma”; (co-edited with Enrico Camporesi, Centre Pompidou / Paris Expérimental, 2023).
He has also curated several exhibitions, among them: “The Site of Film” (KANAL–Centre Pompidou Brussels, 2018, co-curated with Philippe-Alain Michaud), “Ericka Beckman” (KANAL–Centre Pompidou Brussels, 2019), “Philippe Decrauzat, Gradient” (KANAL–Centre Pompidou Brussels, 2021), “Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Diamon” (Centre Pompidou Paris, 2019), “Le reste est ombre. Pedro Costa, Rui Chafes, Paulo Nozolino”; (Centre Pompidou, 2022, co-curated with Philippe-Alain Michaud), and more recently “Rosa Barba, Hear, There, Where the Echoes Are”; (Centre Pompidou, 2023) and “Do You Know Snow?” (Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 2023, co-curated with Pierre Leguillon).
