One | On | One: Liam Gillick & Nicolaus Schafhausen
Artist Liam Gillick and curator Nicolaus Schafhausen will come together for a discussion on Thursday 22 February, marking the fourth One | On | One lecture.
Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick deploys multiple forms to expose the new ideological control systems that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s. Gillick’s work exposes the dysfunctional aspects of a modernist legacy in terms of abstraction and architecture when framed within a globalised, neo-liberal consensus. Gillick uses a wide-ranging vocabulary to knowingly question the role art may play in society and how aesthetics is a political issue in the neo-liberal economy. A selection of Liam Gillick’s writing appeared in 2007 as Proxemics: Selected Writings (1988–2006) and his artistic writing as Allbooks in 2009. In 2016, Columbia University published his book Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820, an analysis of the origins of contemporary art.
Recent solo exhibitions include Liam Gillick: Kinetic Energy of Rigid Bodies, Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne (2021); The Work Life Effect, Gwangju Museum of Art, Gwangju (2021); Stinking Dawn (with Gelatin), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019). Recent group exhibitions include theInaugural exhibition The Tower, LUMA, Arles (2021); Arcimboldo Face to Face, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2021); Catastrophe and Recovery, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2021). In 2009, Gillick represented Germany at the 53rd Venice Biennale, which was curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen.
Nicolaus Schafhausen
Nicolaus Schafhausen is a curator, director, author, and editor. In 2023, Schafhausen founded KIN, a new commercial gallery in Brussels with a focus on artistic positions that defy easy categorisation. KIN stands for kinship and, as such, the gallery is based on a network of artists that he has been working with for many years.
Schafhausen was the artistic director of Tell me about yesterday tomorrow (2019-2020), an exhibition at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism about the future of the past. In addition to curating exhibitions, national pavilions and other projects, Schafhausen has led institutions such as the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and Witte de With Center Contemporary Art (now Kunstituut Melly) in Rotterdam. He was the founding director of the European Kunsthalle, conceived as a project to examine the conditions and structures of contemporary art institutions independent of local government mandates. In 2019, he stepped down as director of the Kunsthalle Wien, a position he held since 2012, for political reasons, observing that the future of such cultural institutions was thrown into question by rising nationalist policies in Austria and elsewhere. Since 2011, Schafhausen has been the strategic director of Fogo Island Arts, Canada, an initiative of Shorefast, a charitable foundation dedicated to finding alternative solutions for the revitalisation of areas prone to emigration.
One | On | One lecture series
Some encounters are life-changing. A single artwork can form or influence a curator’s trajectory and vision, while some exhibitions prove decisive for an artist’s practice.
In this series of talks, an artist and a curator focus on a single artwork and an exhibition that has been pivotal for their career and collaboration.
