ISSUES


ABOUT

Curating, Hospitality, and Institutional Change

 Michael Birchall & Hendrik Folkerts




Bringing together two institutional curators of the same generation is not unusual, but in this case Michael Birchall and Hendrik Folkerts have, in many ways, exchanged destinations. 

After previous curatorial stints at The Art Institute of Chicago, documenta 14, and the Stedelijk Museum, Hendrik recently arrived at the Kunsthaus Zürich as Chief Curator of Program. Michael, meanwhile, has recently departed Zürich for Helsinki, where he has taken up a Professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts. Previously, he spent five years at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, latterly as Co-Director of Exhibitions.

In this conversation, Michael and Hendrik discuss the nuances of curatorial labor, from exhibition-making, institutional responsibility, to the importance of urgency and audiences in contemporary curatorial practice. For both, each action and intention requires a special choreography that ascertains the artistic and cultural risks next to the careful management working in and in between institutions.  They reflect on Hendrik’s vision for what the Kunsthaus might become under the directorship of Ann Demeester after a challenging period for the institution, and where Hendrik’s arrival signals a new chapter.


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Michael: Hendrik, you've recently taken up your position at Kunsthaus Zürich, how many days has it been? I am curious how you are becoming acquainted with Zurich? I spent five years there and now we have traded places, so-to-speak. How would you describe the city's cultural atmosphere and what distinguishes its contemporary art scene from other cities you've worked in?


Hendrik: Okay, dense question, so I'll unpack a little bit. My experience with Zürich has been quite a long one. I've been coming here for like ten to twelve years already, whether it was for the Zürich Art Weekend, of course, a major annual event in the arts calendar here, or through my collaboration with certain artists who live here. Also on a personal level I didn't need to start from scratch.

        I can walk around without a map; it's the small things that matter sometimes that make you feel just a little bit more agile and mobile in how you experience a city. Of course, what is so extraordinary, not just about Zürich actually but about Switzerland at large, is the density of things. How even relatively small cities would have very substantial institutions of art, and huge collections.

        Stepping into my new job at the Kunsthaus is understanding the responsibility that comes with working for the largest museum in Switzerland, which is real, and people look at us and we're very happy that people look at us. This also means you're being scrutinised in the choices that you make, and we can talk a little bit more about that because my role is in part a strategic one, to build longer lines in our programme, but also to be very open, to understand that you're part of an ecology. That also loops me back to that density of Zürich and other cities in Switzerland to actively start building bridges. But also Switzerland is home to many great artists, and Zürich is no exception to that. This is something that in part I know and on the other part, I will have to build a new relationship with; for example, by doing studio visits and just getting to know the art scene a little bit better.

        What I'm really noticing already in my short time here is that Switzerland is very central in Europe. I was previously in Stockholm, which I immensely enjoyed, but Stockholm is a destination. You go there and you don't pass through Stockholm, that's unless, you know, you might go to the North of Sweden or something, of course, but that's rarer. Just in the weeks that I've been here, I've been able to meet a lot of people internationally in our field who passed through Zürich. This is exceptional and really beautiful to have this kind of ongoing conversation, IRL, as the kids say.

        I really am enjoying that connectivity. I would say density and connectivity are two words that really come to mind if I had to describe the Zürich and the Swiss art scene. Maybe a third aspect that I really want to highlight, and I've always admired that from afar, is quality. There is a high quality of exhibitions here because people challenge themselves. I think there is some work to be done on the presence of discourse, on that level, I think it could grow. My background is actually in performance and discursive programming, thinking through different facets of queer histories, that definitely is a discourse that I will continue to advocate for, of course. I think quality comes to mind when I just look at all the amazing exhibitions I've seen in the last few weeks here.

Michael: It’s interesting to hear that you are getting to know artists in Switzerland. I had a similar experience when I first moved there. I spent the first six to nine months, even though it was during COVID, meeting artists online and then arranging in-person studio visits with them. It was something that I tried to do during my tenure because I thought it was important as a new curator. To spend time with artists is crucial, even those you may not ever work within the context of your own programme, and the institutional interest so to speak, but to be visible and open to dialogue is important. 

        Equally important is to know other curators across the country, such as Geneva or nearby in Winterthur. I am doing the same in the Nordic countries now, to get to know the scene. Looking back on your period in Stockholm, how would you reflect on that? Are there any exhibitions that you felt were particularly significant? And how did they shape your curatorial approach?
        Hendrik: Looking back isn't as hard as one might expect because I came to Stockholm and to the job at Moderna Museet with an intent. At that point, I had ten to twelve years of curatorial work under my belt and built my practice in different ways, whether it's from the angle of performance—which is a big anchor in my own practice—or other directions as well, and in very different spaces, like Documenta or a larger museum. I came to Moderna Museet with a mission to deepen my curatorial practice, to better understand how knowledge and experience from the field of performance can be applied to exhibition-making and institution-building. So when it comes to embodiment, the choreographic understanding of space, dramaturgy, and hospitality—all of which are central to both the practice and theory of performance in museums—I became interested in how that knowledge could be used in curatorial practice.

       One of the things that I felt very strongly about is how can I, at the risk of saviourism—I should really choose my words carefully!—but how can I restitute fugitive performance practices from the dire fate of the vitrine? This is something that I felt really strongly about. Therefore, I think Vaginal Davis' exhibition is a complete highlight for me in my program at Moderna Museet. It's a practice that I learned so much from because Vaginal Davis is all our godmother somehow–fairy godmother to the max.

       Ms. Davis has real knowledge to share about what it means to be queer in life and queer in art. Her practice existed in spaces like nightclubs, theatres, zines, bookshops, libraries, et cetera; spaces a museum cannot mirror necessarily, nor should even try to. So once you start ushering in these practices into more institutional frameworks, you have to consider how you are going to do that? As I said before, I did not want the vitrine as the main display mechanism for a practice that’s mainly anchored in performance, but rather to have a conversation with Ms. Davis about it. For example, how could we apply her recent method of creating these large-scale installations as a metabolization of her own archive? That was a big part of that performance knowledge being applied to exhibition-making. The exhibition took place across seven institutions and spaces across Stockholm, so another question was how can you build a performative exhibition that makes people move through a city, through the lens of an artist. Moderna Museet presented the more central part of the exhibition, while simultaneously other parts of the exhibition were taking place at the National Museum, Accelerator Konsthall, Index - Swedish Foundation for Contemporary Art, Moderna Dansteater, Tensta Konsthall, and Cinema Queer.

       In this case my experience of working at documenta 14 played a big role, an exhibition that took place partially simultaneously in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. Especially in Athens, you would get lost a little bit while looking for venues, which was intentional, part of the pleasure of doing that exhibition there. Those experiences also prompted the question of what does it really mean to be a guest in someone else's space?

       At the risk of sounding sentimental, I think we all have our own journey with queerness, with inhabiting a position that falls outside certain forms of normativity. For a long time, I felt somewhat insecure, wondering whether I was “queer enough” to hold and present the work of an extraordinary artist like Vaginal Davis. That uncertainty ultimately pushed me to articulate a response within the institutional space itself: How do I hold this work responsibly? How do I inhabit queerness within a structure that so often risks flattening or deadening things, which institutions, at times, inevitably do?

       To quote the great writer and artist, Every Ocean Hughes, how can we build a structure to be alive inside? This is one of the main questions that has been guiding me over the last fifteen years. I'm giving you a bit of a zigzag answer, but I think Vaginal Davis was an important project for me, as well as the exhibition on Mike Kelly.

       I did these two exhibitions back-to-back, first Ms. Davis and then Mike's exhibition, which was a very different project for me because I was receiving that project as a travelling exhibition from the Tate Modern. I wanted to build a different type of architecture and a different type of spatial experience for Mike's work. It was also somewhat necessary, I think, to build a new reception for Mike's work in 2025, which is the year that that exhibition happened in Stockholm. I had already started my conversation with the design and architecture office Formafantasma, who ended up making the exhibition architecture..

       Mike's work has all these longer lines of enquiry when it comes to performance and the art object and the body. He was asking these questions over 30 years of practice. So my question became: how can we give this material a different surface or mode of encounter? The response Formafantasma and I articulated was to develop an architectural structure with a distinct materiality, namely metal mesh walls that are suspended fifty centimetres off the ground. In a sense, it created a skeletal framework for the exhibition, but it also introduced moments of slippage and permeability. Sound, movement, footsteps, everything slipped beneath and through the structure.

       We also removed sections of the mesh panels to create long sightlines across the exhibition. One example I often return to was in the first room, while standing among Mike Kelley’s late 1970s and early 1980s performance works, from where you could see directly into another gallery containing Sublevel (1998), his extraordinary performance sculpture, a work that only fully activates through bodily engagement. Beyond that, along the same axis, was Mike’s Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (2000–2011) series, with its deeply theatrical dimension. So within a single line of sight, you encountered three distinct modalities of performance spanning nearly thirty years of work.

       That was really the point for me, drawing on a knowledge grounded in performance practice to think through how dramaturgy, slippage and leakage, visibility, and spatial relations shape an exhibition. How do you construct a choreography of space in which these encounters can happen? In this case, it was through an artist who felt simultaneously historical and contemporary. To put it bluntly, Mike had passed away too recently to be fully historicised, but long enough ago that it became possible, or actually necessary, to consider the reception of his work from a different perspective. The exhibition therefore required a very particular kind of treatment.

       These are the kinds of projects I continue to return to, projects that remind me of the intentions I arrived at the museum with in the first place.
Michael: Well, you’ve already pre-empted the question I had prepared about Mike Kelley, which is great. But perhaps I can fold it into the next question instead. I actually want to ask two things. Firstly, you mentioned using what you yourself called a somewhat uncomfortable term, a “methodology of hospitality” within your curatorial thinking and practice. Secondly, how do you see that shaping your curatorial programme at the Kunsthaus Zürich? But maybe I should take a step back first, can you share where this idea originates from, and what sits at the root of it for you, so to speak?

Hendrik: My first job in a museum was as a curator of performance, film and discursive programming at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. This was at a moment when the museum was closed for renovation and expansion. The question of hospitality becomes very urgent when you don't have a building. Under the directorship of Ann Goldstein, we decided to open up a part of the building and organize a number of exhibitions. At the same time, we were developing a model of public programming that became a central nexus, welcoming audiences into a building that was, in many ways, still unfinished, within a space that required substantial redevelopment. At the same time, we were collaborating with many sister institutions in the cities to co-organize exhibitions, performances, and events in their buildings. So on the one hand, the museum had a more Kunsthalle atmosphere, and on the other, it often found itself a guest in other institutional homes—which is an exceptional state to be in for a museum with that kind of history, of course.

        With performance, you're hosting bodies, you're hosting personalities, you're hosting people who need to be fed, who need to warm up, who need a hotel, who need a flight, who do not need a rock hard stone floor to dance on, but something more accommodating so they don't destroy their bodies. You need to host an audience in a way that allows them to meet with something unexpected, something alive.

        I think the hospitality question became so natural to all the work that was happening for me at the beginning, that it's something that I took with me as a methodology. But perhaps that is too big of a word because it was really like, “just fucking do it,” you know? Later, maybe five or ten years into your practice, you start to reflect a little bit like, oh, wow, I've done all this kind of hospitality work, what does it actually mean? Then maybe it can become a methodology. You can start to build theory, you can start to build thinking around it somehow. And that's a process that I went through for myself and again, sort of applied it to Vaginal Davis’s exhibition and all these other things that I mentioned.

        I'm meeting an art scene in Zürich that's very open and I'm very excited about things happening. There is an eagerness and a willingness for this museum, the Kunsthaus, to do the best that they can. It's being scrutinised and rightfully so, but it's a museum that has all the ingredients. It has good buildings, it has an amazing collection. It has a great team, many of whom are new like me actually. It has a recent change in leadership with Ann Demeester, and with changing leadership also comes a different attitude to the city. Ann is a very open and generous person. Therefore the museum is also changing its attitude a little bit from a Zürich “fortress” to a space that is at the center of the city.

        This is an important mentality change. I can now use all that knowledge of hospitality and all that experience that I have, and help to make this museum as open and as welcoming as humanly possible for the artists that we work with—whether they be historical or living they need to be hosted, in a way that honors what they are doing or have done. Also, for the visitors, that once they come through the heavy doors of the Chipperfield building or the sliding doors of the Moser building, that they immediately feel very welcome in that space and that they’re immediately meeting art. I'm at the beginning of my journey here, obviously, so I can't speak from experience just yet, but again, I can speak from intent.


Michael: That’s wonderful to hear because, honestly, I think the Kunsthaus Zürich has needed new leadership for quite some time. It has also needed people like yourself to help shape and contribute to that broader vision. 

        As you say, it has long carried the perception of being somewhat removed from the city, almost an institution on the hill. When I first arrived, I found it difficult to grasp what the ethos of the institution was. But with Ann Demeester’s arrival, and the warmth and generosity she brings, as you mentioned, really began to shift perceptions of what the museum could become. 

        From conversations I’ve had with her over the years, it’s clear that she sees this as a long-term process, one that involves a great deal of work. Part of that process is building a curatorial team capable of realising that vision. It was genuinely exciting to hear about your appointment. It felt immediately clear that bringing in your experience and perspective would be enormously valuable for the institution. More than that, though, it seems that you and Ann share a similar sensibility and spirit, and that feels especially important at this moment. Considering both the challenges and the transformations currently underway, I wonder if you could speak a little about the institution’s future direction. What kinds of identity, ambitions, or curatorial approaches can audiences and readers expect from the Kunsthaus in the coming years?


Hendrik: I think one thing that we're really thinking about very actively at the moment, in this new team, is how the Kunsthaus is one Haus with four buildings. You have the historical Moser-bau, the 1950s Pfister-bau which is our major exhibition hall, the Müller-bau, which is this 1970s postmodern gem, really, and then you have the Chipperfield building which opened a mere five years ago. I think each building could have a stronger focus, given that they each have a different display mechanism and history. Also, in terms of how it's showing its collections, what the building is used for and how it is used. Maja Wismer, who was recently appointed as Head of Collections and Research, is really looking at this at the level of collection, while I, in close dialogue with Ann and my colleagues, am looking at it on the level of exhibition and programming. 

        What is also interesting about these four buildings is that they each have a different display mechanism and history. The Moser-bau is a historical site, which assumes the character of the bourgeois salon. The Pfister-bau is your classical white cube, slightly avant-la-lettre. The Chipperfield is the twenty first century resonance of that, as this neoclassical temple turned white cube.

        And then there is the Müller-bau. I find it an interesting building because it's a little hidden, it's embraced by these other buildings, so kind of invisible from the outside. It opened in 1976 as the epitome of postmodern architecture with its brutalist appearance and its wild choreographic open architecture. From the beginning, people were afraid of it because it was so open, it barely had any walls and had this light kind of beaming in. Because of that, the first response was to build walls, a response I can only read as fear and anxiety around the openness of that building.

        Building so many walls is of course a violation in that building because then you're going against the very nature of what it wants to do. We're going to deeply engage with the Müller-bau, because there we need to do the most work, also to return to the DNA of what the Kunsthaus is and how it was founded, namely by artists. It will become an artist house, where we can imagine many different engagements that we as a museum can have with an artist. It can be on the level of experimental exhibition-making and display; on the level of encounters between an artist's work and the Kunsthaus's collections; it can be so many different things; but, it will always be a contemporary angle towards an art historical moment or question. Therefore, to borrow from Ann’s vocabulary, this is a trans-historical approach and that’s where it can really start to come alive. With that building, you can do so many extraordinary things, it is just a big, fat invitation, that building, as far as I see it. Then, the other three buildings can perform their function also a bit sharper, I think, and everything will start to sing. This is a big strategic conversation, basically, that Ann has invited me into. I'm really excited about this, because there you can see real change in how you access spaces and how you kind of navigate this sort of institution; and where we can embrace experiment, especially in the Müller-Bau.

        I was at a dinner yesterday and I was sitting next to a person who was not in the art world and it's very apparent how we take language for granted at times. The person remarked, “What do you mean by experiment?” That’s actually a great question because it literally means to do something you haven't done before and to embrace the possibility of failure. So, this is something that a museum finds very scary. Of course, we will do our best, also for every artist's sake, to make the project as best as it possibly can be. 


Michael: When I lived in Zürich, I found it to be an incredibly dynamic city with a dense artistic community and a unique position within central Europe. Despite its relatively small size, the contemporary art scene feels expansive, partly because of its close proximity to other European art centres and their institutional networks. At the same time, Zürich is a complex city—beyond its reputation as a global financial centre, there is also a strong history of activism and community-led initiatives that continues to inform its cultural landscape. I’m curious how you experience these different and sometimes conflicting identities within the city?


Hendrik: What I find really fascinating about Zürich is that it is, like any other city, it has many different faces. There is an almost Dada-like anarchism, a more radical history that is still strongly felt. If you speak to that part, if you speak to that history, then, somehow, anything becomes possible, and people are proud of that. 

        It's also a deeply financialized city, obviously; it's one of the financial centers of the world, and that relationship to wealth and global finance is also very deeply felt. It's also a very centrally located place that has managed to isolate itself from the rest of Europe, in some ways. That comes with certain, subtle or not so subtle forms of conservatism as well, that one has to navigate here and there. 

        I find it interesting that Zürich holds so many things, and these are just three aspects that I am observing from the get-go. This is why I'm happy to work here, because the Kunsthaus is big enough to pull out different drawers. For example, the exhibition of Kerry James Marshall’s work that we've just opened can exist side-by-side with Marisol, with Vilhelm Hammershøi, and so forth—all doing different things. I think this is beautiful. But the mission is, of course, to do everything with an edge and to drive some things a little bit further into the experimental.

        We’re currently doing a lot of research into who our audience really is. There are some interesting findings that come out of that, for instance that our audience base of between fifteen years old and thirty years old is very strong. The thing they love most about us is our collections—perhaps something you would not necessarily associate with that age group. It goes to show, we should never think for an audience but rather with them, give them a really beautiful menu of all the things this house can serve every day of the year. And that is what we will do. 


Michael: Thank you for sharing your thoughts Hendrik, I look forward to seeing what you do in Zürich in the coming years ahead. 



Michael Birchall is a curator, writer, and Professor of Exhibiting, Curating and Mediating in Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. He was previously Co-Director of Exhibitions at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, where he led a programme of exhibitions, commissions, and publications; and curated exhibitions with Haegue Yang, Dineo Seshee Raisibe Bopape, Tarek Lakhrissi, and Renée Green. He held curatorial positions at Tate Liverpool, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and The Banff Centre, and is currently preparing a book on artistic labour and collaboration for Routledge.


Hendrik Folkerts is Chief Curator of Programme at Kunsthaus Zürich. Previously, he was Curator International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2021-2026); Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Art Institute of Chicago (2017-2022); Curator at documenta 14 (2014-2017); and Curator of Performance, Film, and Discursive Programs at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) (2010-2015). His recent exhibitions include: House of Nisaba: The New Language of Painting (2026), Karol Radziszewski: The Classroom (2026), Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit (2025, with Tate Modern, London), Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product (2024-2026, with Gropius-Bau and MoMA PS1), Seven Rooms and a Garden: Rashid Johnson and Moderna Museet’s Collection (2023), Katalin Ladik: Ooooooooo-pus (2023, with Haus der Kunst and Ludwig Forum Aachen), Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Time (2022), and Igshaan Adams: Desire Lines (2022). He writes regularly for exhibition catalogs and artists’ monographs.