Special Talk: Nicolas Bourriaud

With his 1998 book, Esthétique relationnelle (Relational Aesthetics) he established the genre of relational art, and this year, with the release of the Japanese translation of Radicant, Nicolas Bourriaud is as pertinent as ever. Bourriaud established the Palais de Tokyo, served as director of the multi-site institution Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo) with its art center, art school, and museum, and is now an independent curator.
His talk will focus on his ideas and vision through an introduction of his projects past and present.

Speakers:
Nicolas Bourriaud (Curator/Writer)
Kei Osawa (Curator & Associate Researcher, The University Museum, the University of Tokyo (UMUT))

Cooperation: Institut français du Japon

Speakers’ Profiles

Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud, born in 1965, is a curator and writer. He is the founder of Radicants. Recent exhibitions he has curated include; Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime (Palazzo Bollani, Venice, 2022) and The 7th Continent (Istanbul Biennial, 2019). Bourriaud was the director of Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo), an institution he created, gathering the La Panacée art centre, the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the MoCo Museum, from 2016 to 2021. He was the director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris from 2011 to 2015. From 2010 to 2011, he headed the studies department at the Ministry of Culture in France. He was Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London from 2007 to 2010 and founder advisor for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv. He also founded and co-directed the Palais de Tokyo, Paris between 1999 and 2006.

Kei Osawa
Kei Osawa (b. 1984) graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. From the perspective of Art History and Aesthetics, conducts research on postwar Japanese art, Japanese crafts as well as the history of jazz recordings. As a curator, organized exhibitions in Japan and abroad, among others at the Intermediatheque in Tokyo.