“All writing is rewriting – the important thing is how it is done.”
– McKenzie Wark, Sensoria, 2020
In November, I will assume the role of director of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. I first visited the institution more than ten years ago; when I moved to Düsseldorf for the first time in early 2016, I could never have imagined that I would one day have the privilege of contributing to shape the history of this place. The path that has led me (back) here has been marked by different cities, practices, spaces, relationships, encounters—and, ultimately, by artists. The Rhineland, and Düsseldorf in particular, have played a formative role in my life and work. From 2016 to 2019, I was director of Galerie Max Mayer and also co-founded the project space Linden, which was located in a backyard on Ackerstraße. Even after moving to Munich in the fall of 2019 to take up the position of curator at Kunstverein München, my connection to Düsseldorf remained constant, sustained through conversations and friendships with many of the people who live and work here.
My curatorial approach builds from a site-sensitive engagement and an understanding of the institution as a porous space of possibility. A central concern for me lies in questions of institutional memory and the causative dynamics that generate what Doreen Mende has termed the “subjectivity of the institution”: institutions are always collective and collaborative in nature; they never form in isolation but emerge through shared reflection on what the place can become. Within this framework, history is not understood retrospectively, but as an active negotiation of present interests and conditions. For me, Kunstverein Düsseldorf operates precisely within this field of tension—between nearly two centuries of tradition, with its bicentennial coming up in 2029, and the urgencies of artistic and curatorial experimentation.
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