Jens Hoffmann
Jens Hoffmann Mesén (born 1974 in San José, Costa Rica) is a writer and curator of exhibitions. He has worked as a curator since 1997 and is currently the Director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he also directs the Capp Street Project artists-in-residency program. From 2003 to 2007 he was the Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He has curated over 30 exhibitions internationally since the late 1990s. Most recently he was co-curator of the 2nd San Juan Triennial, Puerto Rico, 2009 and is currently co-curating, with Harrell Fletcher, the People's Biennial, to be held in 2010 at five US museums, organized by Independent Curators International in New York. In 2009 Hoffmann founded The Exhibitionist: A Journal for Exhibition Making. He was nominated by the Menil Collection in Houston for the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2008. Hoffmann is the curator, together with Adriano Pedrosa, of the 12th Istanbul Biennial in 2011.
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 highly unique practice and personalized exhibition history reflective of a creative development not dissimilar to that of an artist.
He is a senior lecturer at the Curatorial Practice Program of the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, a guest professor at the Nova Academia di Bella Arti in Milan and an adjunct faculty member of the Curatorial Studies Program of Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Hoffmann was trained as a theater director and studied Stage Directing, Dramaturgy and Cultural Sociology at the Ernst Busch School for Performing Arts in Berlin. He holds an MA in Theater from DasArts – School for Advanced Research in Theatre and Dance Studies at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Amsterdam.