What is it that drives you?

Power Ekroth talks with Daniel Birnbaum in 2005..

PE: Your background with a PhD on Husserl in philosophy is by no means a natural way leading into a curatorial role and working with visual art. Why did you become a curator and what is it that drives you?

DB: Initially and fundamentally it is about a genuine interest to try to understand. It is about trying to understand ones immediate contemporary times which one is apart of and also not being merely a spectator of it, but instead being on the artists side of the fence so to speak. This way one tries to get into a dialogue with the contemporary “zeitgeist” and somehow also to try to formulate it.

I have always been around artists and working together with artists; 25 years ago I was already helping out artists with their exhibitions but not perhaps in such a conscious way as today, and also I started to write about art in daily newspapers which in a way also is about going into dialogue with the artists. However the role of the critic has been hollowed-out, perhaps especially so in the Nordic countries although it is a global tendency and my interest is much deeper inside the discursive moment, writing essays for example. I never wanted to become a museum curator, maybe because my mother worked as a museum curator, instead I was always much more interested in the production-side of art and being behind the scenes. It is an idea about immediate contemporaneaity I guess and to be able to formulate it. The exhibition as a medium is a very interesting medium; I regard exhibitions to be visual essays. If Harald Szeemann used the term of “visual poems” I would rather like to use the term “visual essays.”

To understand one’s contemporaneaity means that one must also see to the contemporary history and this was also what we had in mind with the more historic discursive element in the Italian Pavilion curated together with Francesco Bonami in Venice two years ago.