BÜRO SCHRAMM/GESTALTUNG
The Biennale de Montreal announced yesterday that Philippe Pirotte will curate its 2016 edition. Pirotte is currently the director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Künste Städelschule and Portikus, both of which are located in Frankfurt.
The Belgium-born curator will head up the exhibitions, publications, and events for the upcoming biennale, which is coproduced with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and scheduled to open on October 19, 2016. The artist list for that biennial, named BNLMTL 2016 for short, will be announced in May. This Biennale’s theme will be announced sometime this year.
Pirotte is known for curating shows of contemporary art in Europe. In his six-year tenure as the director of the Kunsthalle Bern, he organized solo exhibitions of such artists as Allan Kaprow, Jutta Koether, and Oscar Tuazon. He also co-founded the Antwerp-based, nonprofit contemporary art center objectif_exhibitions in 2012.
“I’m thrilled with the opportunity to develop an ambitious international project that engages with Montreal’s complexity,” Pirotte said in a statement. “At the moment, I am imagining the exhibition as a space that informs us about ourselves—uninvited. Simultaneously playful and fatalistic, it is a space where things can go awry. In that sense, the exhibition does not provide relief because its objects do not necessarily reveal themselves as truths.”