Hans Ulrich Obrist
Curator, Critic, and Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries
WHAT IS YOUR CALLING CARD?
Handwritten Post-its.
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE MORE OF IN YOUR INDUSTRY? LESS OF?
Kindness, togetherness, and experimentation. “There’s no end to experimentation,” as Zaha Hadid once told me. More sustainability and slow programming.
WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE, WHAT WERE YOU KNOWN FOR?
Staging postcard exhibitions in my bedroom. As a child, I collected postcards of artworks from museums. I then started to design exhibitions in little boxes in my bedroom and on panels. They were wooden panels, and I didn’t have enough time or money to cover them with fabric like Aby Warburg did, but that’s how I did my first exhibitions in a way. I could move them around easily and I rearranged them as I pleased.
““People think that I don’t sleep. I have to sleep in order to dream.””
WHAT’S SOMETHING PEOPLE GET WRONG ABOUT YOU?
That I don’t sleep. I have to sleep in order to dream.
NAME AN INFLUENCE OF YOURS THAT MIGHT SURPRISE PEOPLE.
Hildegard von Bingen and the oracle Mariangela de Gaetano, who was introduced to me by Alighiero Boetti.
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SURPRISED YOURSELF IN YOUR WORK?
During lockdown, when I wrote a very personal book called A Life in Progress, something I had never done before. And when I became a gamer playing video games doing research for the “WORLDBUILDING” show.
WHAT’S ONE BOOK, WORK OF ART, ALBUM, OR FILM THAT GOT YOU THROUGH AN IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR LIFE?
Carl Seelig, Walks With Walser.
in your life?
