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JENS HOFFMANN
Thursday, May 24, 2007
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Jens Hoffmann is a writer and curator based in San Francisco where he is the Director of the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art and a senior lecturer of the MA Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts. Since 2003 Hoffmann is also a faculty member of the Creative Curating Program at Goldsmiths College, University of London. From 2003-07 he was Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, where he organized several group exhibitions, including \”Artists\’ Favorites\” (2004), \”London in Six Easy Steps\” (2005), “Around the World in Eighty Days” (2006), “Surprise, Surprise” (2006) and \”Alien Nation\” (2006) as well as solo exhibitions of artist such as John Bock, Cerith Wyn Evans, Tino Sehgal, Jonathan Monk and Martha Rosler.
As an independent curator Hoffmann has curated over three-dozen exhibitions internationally since the late 1990s most recently “The Studio” at the Hugh Lane Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2006). He has written over 100 texts on art and curatorial practice and published a number of books including most recently PERFORM, published by Thames & Hudson, London (2005). Currently he is working on SHOWTIME, a book outlining the history of exhibitions from 1989 till the present, forthcoming with DuMont, Cologne, in 2008.
Emerging, unusually, from a training in theatre rather than art history or curatorial studies, Hoffmann has used his directorial knowledge in particular to articulate his unique approach to curating. Of key importance for all of his exhibitions is the actual staging of the experience—ranging from the design of the space and installation, the conceptualization of the catalogue and related programming, to the attention paid to the performance of the work itself. The ‘stage-set’ or rather the exhibition space, site, or geographical location is itself an important factor in the development of his ideas which respond to both time and place. Hoffmann takes into account both the larger historical and socio-political context in which an exhibition takes place as well as the relevant curatorial or art historical relationships pertaining to a project. Using the ideas and strategies of artists, in particular conceptual art, and applying this approach to a curatorial idea of the author is a defining characteristic of Hoffmann’s work and results in a personalized exhibition history reflective of a creative development not dissimilar to that of an artist.