Nicolas Bourriaud


Nicolas Bourriaud is a curator and art critic, who has curated a great number of exhibitions and biennials all over the world.
With Jérôme Sans, Bourriaud cofounded the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where he served as codirector from 1999 to 2006. He was the Paris correspondent for Flash Art and the founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art. Bourriaud was the Gulbenkian curator of contemporary art from 2007 to 2010 at Tate Britain in London. In 2009 he curated the fourth Tate Triennial, titled Altermodern. He was the Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, an art school in Paris, France, from 2011 to 2015. In 2015 Bourriaud was appointed director of the La Panacée art centre and the director of the Contemporary Art Center of Montpellier, France.

Writing

Bourriaud is best known among English speakers for his publications Relational Aesthetics, Postproduction, and The Exform. Relational Aesthetics in particular has come to be seen as a defining text for a wide variety of art produced by a generation who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1990s. Bourriaud coined the term in 1995, in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition Traffic that was shown at the CAPC contemporary art museum in Bordeaux.
In Postproduction, Bourriaud relates deejaying to contemporary art. Radicant aims to define the emergence of the first global modernity, based on translation and nomadic forms, against the postmodern aesthetics based on identities. In The Exform, Bourriaud examines the dynamics of ideology, specifically as it was developed in the work of Louis Althusser, to account for distinctions between the productive and unproductive, product and waste, and the included and excluded in their relation to society and art production.

Books