Jens Hoffmann
Jens Hoffmann Mesèn is a writer and exhibition maker. He currently is Deputy Director of the Jewish Museum in New York.
Career
Jens Hoffmann has curated more than 40 exhibitions internationally and written over 200 texts on art and exhibition making since the late 1990s. Since 2012 he has been deputy director of the Jewish Museum in New York where he oversees exhibitions, collections and public programs.
From 2002 to 2006 Hoffmann was the director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and from 2007 to 2012 he was director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts where he also directed the Capp Street Artist in Residence program in San Francisco.
He was co-curator of 9th Shanghai Biennale, 2012-2013, the inaugural exhibition of the Power Station of Art, China's first public contemporary art museum. With Adriano Pedrosa he curated the 12th Istanbul Biennial in 2011. He co-curated the 2nd San Juan Triennial in Puerto Rico in 2009, was a guest curator of the 9th Lyon Biennial in 2007, guest curator for Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt in 2002 and co-curator of the 1st Berlin Biennial in 1998. With Harrell Fletcher, he developed the People's Biennial (together with Independent Curators International), of which the first edition was presented in 2010-11 at five U.S. museums, the second edition will be presented at MOCA Detroit in 2014. In 1999 Hoffmann organized, together with Maurizio Cattelan, the 9th Caribbean Biennial in St, Kitts.
Hoffmann has been closely associated with the work of artists such as Tino Sehgal, Ryan Gander, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mario Gracia Torres, Claire Fontaine, Harrell Fletcher, Abraham Cuzvillegas, Annette Kelm, Rivane Neuenschwander, Marepe, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Martha Rosler, Kirsten Pieroth, John Bock, Jonathan Monk, Kris Martin, John Baldessari, Luisa Lambri, Roman Ondak, Tim Lee and Paul McCarthy among others.
In 2009 he founded the publication The Exhibitionist: A Journal on Exhibition Making, which has advocated the author theory as developed specifically by François Truffaut in his 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" ("A certain tendency in French cinema") and adopted Truffaut's ideas to the sphere of exhibition making. Hoffmann has been editor-at-large for Mousse magazine since 2011 and is a frequent contributor to Frieze and Artforum.
In 2006 Hoffmann began working with the Kadist Art Foundation, which is based in Paris and San Francisco, and has built their 101 Collection, a collection of artworks from the West Coast of the United States, and El Sur, a collection of artworks by young and emerging Latin American artists.
Hoffmann was an associate professor at the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco (2006-2012) and has been an adjunct professor at the Nova Academia di Bella Arti in Milan since 2004. From 2003 to 2009 he was a lecturer at the MFA in Curating Program at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2012 Hoffmann was Visiting Professor and Course Leader of the 4th Gwangju Biennial Curatorial Course.
Hoffmann trained as a theater director and studied stage directing, dramaturgy, with Andrea Breth and Manfred Karge and cultural sociology with Wolfgang Engler at the Ernst Busch School for Performing Arts in Berlin. He holds an MA from DasArts: School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance Studies at the Amsterdam School for the Arts were he studied under the Dutch theater pioneer Ritsaert ten Cate.
Hoffmann's training in theater has as much influence on his curatorial efforts as his experience with art history and curating. Of key importance for all of his exhibitions is the staging of the experience, from the design of the installation to the conceptualization of the catalogue, the related programming, and the "performances" of the artworks themselves. The stage set of 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 the larger historical and sociopolitical context in which an exhibition is happening as well as the relevant curatorial and art historical relationships.
A defining characteristic of Hoffmann's work is his conception of an authorial role for the curator, as well as applying the ideas and strategies of artists (in particular Conceptual art) to his curatorial efforts. His unique approach has resulted in a highly personal exhibition history that reflects a creative development not dissimilar to that of an artist.
From 1995 to 1997 Hoffmann worked as an assistant dramaturg under Tom Stromberg at the Theater Am Turm in Frankfurt where he worked on productions of such directors as Rene Pollesch, Stefan Pucher, Reza Abdoh, Needcompany, Michael Laub, Jan Fabre, Gob Squad and Heiner Goebbels. Stromberg and Hoffmann realized the performing arts program for Documenta X "Theater Sketches" in 1997. The following year Hoffmann became co-curator of the 1st Berlin Biennial, which he organized as artistic coordinator with Klaus Biesenbach, Nancy Spector, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. This was followed by two years at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as an assistant curator for contemporary art.
He worked for Brussels 2000: Cultural Capital of Europe, for which he curated, with Barbara Vanderlinden, the program Indiscipline, a large scale series of talks, lectures, and performances exploring interdisciplinary links among science, art, political theory, and architecture though the spoken word. From 2001 to 2002 Hoffmann worked as a curator at the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, where he organized SPECTACULAR: The Art of Action, a yearlong examination of the relationship between performance art and the museum's collection, with various stagings and actions taking place throughout the museum.
In 2007 Hoffmann founded the Museum of Modern Art and Western Antiquities for which he curated the exhibition Section III, Department of Pigments on Surface: Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London. His second exhibition for the museum Section IV, Department of Light Recordings: Lens Drawings, opened in 2013 at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris. Hoffmann is developing an exhibition for Section II, Department of Carving and Modeling, which will take place in 2019.
In 2011 Hoffmann curated BLOCKBUSTER: Cinema for Exhibitions, produced by La Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel (CIAC), Mexico City, the largest touring exhibition of film and video art organized in Latin America to date. BLOCKBUSTER has been presented at: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO) (2011), Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City (2012); Museo de Arte de Sonora (MUSAS) (2012); Museo de Arte de Sinaloa (MASIN) (2013) and Museo AROCENA, Torreón (2013).
Based on Jean-Pierre Melville's Association des Cinématographie Indépendants (ACI) Hoffmann founded the Association des Conservateurs Indépendants (ACI) (Association of Independent Curators) in 2008 of which he is the only member.
In 2013, together with Edoardo Bonaspetti, Andrea Lissoni and Filipa Ramos, Hoffmann developed Vdrome.org, an online platform offering screenings of films and videos directed by visual artists and filmmakers, whose production lies in-between contemporary art and cinema.
Hoffmann has worked for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Documenta X, Kassel, Germany; Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany; Laboratorium, Antwerp, Belgium; Performance Space 122, New York; and the Theater Am Turm, Frankfurt, Germany.
He has curated exhibitions for KIASMA - Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery, Ireland; Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Roomade—Office for Contemporary Art, Brussels; Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro; IASPIS, Stockholm; Basis voor Actuele Kunst (BAK), Utrecht, the Netherlands; Museum in Progress, Vienna; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Manchester Art Gallery, England; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; ArtPace, San Antonio; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown and others.
From 2003 to 2012 Hoffmann worked as a curator for Art Basel for which he conceived and organized the programs Art Perform (2003-2007), Art on Stage (2008-2009) and Art Parcours (2010-2012).
Hoffmann also organized a number of exhibitions for commercial galleries such as Sean Kelly, New York (1997); Klosterfelde, Berlin (1999 and 2006); Casey Kaplan, New York (2003); Christina Guerra, Lisbon (2007); Thomas Dane, London (2007); Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2008); Kurimanzuto, Mexico City (2010); Johnen Galerie, Berlin (2011); 303, New York (2012); Marian Goodman, Paris (2013).
His most recent books include Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating (Mousse Publishing, 2013), The Studio (for the MIT Press series Documents of Contemporary Art and Whitechapel Gallery, 2012), The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by An Artist (ed.) (Revolver, 2004), and Perform (coauthored with Joan Jonas, Thames & Hudson, 2005). Show Time, a history of exhibitions from 1990 to the present, is forthcoming from Thames & Hudson in March of 2014, The Exhibition As A Dramatic Construction will be published by Sternberg Press in November 2013. He is currently developing Curating A-Z for JRP|Ringier to be published in 2014.