Can a museum go beyond art?
- Funda Küçükyılmaz
- 30 Nis
- 28 dakikada okunur
We spoke with Charles Esche, who left his position as director of the Van Abbemuseum after 20 years, about his perspective on art, curating, museum management, his ongoing exhibitions at the museum and his future plans
Interview: Funda Küçükyılmaz
Charles Esche
I submitted this interview to the editor in early March for the print edition. Not long after, like many others, I found myself caught in the political storm that began on March 19, a storm that continues to wound us more deeply with each passing day. In a moment when even our most basic rights, justice, law, and freedom seem to be slipping through our fingers, I didn’t feel ready to revisit the text and prepare it for online publication. I wasn’t sure if we could still speak about art while all this was happening, or whether a story about a museum and a curator in the Netherlands could mean anything to us right now. But when I returned to the interview, I was reminded, quite the opposite, that it’s precisely now that we need culture and art more than ever. Why are we so divided in Türkiye and across the world? Why do we continue to face violence and injustice? What are we really up against? As Esche suggests, could art institutions be more than just spaces for exhibitions and performances? Could they become places that bring different people together, make us think, and help build awareness of what we’re really dealing with? And perhaps most importantly, can they regain the political and economic independence they need to do so?
After two decades leading the Van Abbemuseum, Charles Esche has stepped down from his role as director. Located in Eindhoven, the southern Dutch city known for its roots in Philips and its reputation in technology and innovation, the museum gained international acclaim not through conventional means of collecting art, but through the web of relationships Esche helped weave across different geographies and communities. This unique approach made the Van Abbemuseum one of the most talked-about contemporary art institutions in the world. In this interview, we talk with Esche about his twenty years at the museum, his views on art, curating, and museology, as well as the exhibitions currently on view and what lies ahead for him.
The years when Charles first began his role at Van Abbe coincided with the time I started becoming curious about the global cultural landscape, driven by a desire to work in the arts and culture field in Istanbul. Back then, I first came across the names of Charles, the museum, and the city of Eindhoven through the 9th Istanbul Biennial and the EindhovenIstanbul exhibition. The idea of bringing together concepts like museums, biennials, art, cities, and urban spaces, and of artists and art professionals from around the world collaborating and sharing their work with local residents in a modest but meaningful way, left a deep impression on me.
Since then, twenty years have passed marked by dozens of projects I worked on, mostly with joy and at times with disappointment, alongside a series of political and economic crises in Türkiye and globally, wars, migrations, the digital boom, and the rise of artificial intelligence. In a twist of fate, I recently moved to Eindhoven, the very city I first heard about through Charles and Van Abbemuseum. When I learned that he would be stepping down from his role, I was surprised to find myself saddened by the departure of the one person who, though we had never met, had given meaning to what was, for me, the only “familiar” space in the city.
Talking with Charles for this interview helped me understand the source of that sadness. He is someone who articulates himself with clarity, understands the zeitgeist, and views institutions, which are often managed as businesses, from a deeply human perspective. He does so with a realism that doesn’t fear exclusion or being on the margins. You could listen to him for hours. As I walked through the two exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, both curated by Charles, I felt as if I was navigating a map of our conversation. I was genuinely sad to hear he was leaving, because in a world that often feels like it’s on fire, Van Abbe had become a place that offered me something to hold onto. Now, I’m curious to see what kind of experience the museum will offer after the legacy he’s left behind.
Left: Art is a Verb, Peter Cox, Van Abbemuseum, 2024. Photo: Cleo Goossens Right: Congolese art collective CATPC enters into dialogue with Van Abbe museum collection, 2024, Photo: Nick Bookelaar
As the director of Van Abbe, you created a museum which is more than (white) walls. Van Abbe is experimental, unconventional, socially and politically engaged. It offers an inclusive, international platform rather than only showcasing collection items. In one of your last exhibitions titled Two Sides of the Same Coin for example, you worked with CATPC, which is a collective made up of former Congolese plantation workers. You also collaborated with exhibitions, biennials in different countries including Türkiye, Slovenia and South Korea. In a way, you brought different worlds / outside to the museum. And maybe, that’s why you've been described as an "outsider" in the Dutch art world. How do you think this has shaped your approach to museum leadership, to your curatorial approach to your vision for the Van Abbemuseum?
It's a complicated story. I think, from the moment I started and all the way through the period, I understood the Dutch art scene in terms of an ecosystem in which museums could do different things rather than all do the same. I was kind of shocked when I first got there. As you say, this idea of outsider status is true, and there was the demand that insider status meant essentially, you were fighting over the same ground, rather than distinguishing yourself by doing different things.
It's remarkable to me that if we look at the collections, I came in 2004, so now 21 years ago, and in the 90s, and 80s and 70s, it's remarkable how many of the same artists are collected by almost all the modern art museums, as they were then called in the Netherlands. Essentially, they were fighting over a very small area of practice. If it came to Donald Judd, or Carl Andre, or Laurence Wiener, or Anselm Kiefer, or Immendorff, or Baselitz, then you would see, they were represented almost across the board in all the institutions, whether it was in Rotterdam, in Amsterdam, in Utrecht, in Maastricht, or in Eindhoven. I thought this was a huge missed opportunity.
Why not in a small city, or small country, where basically people can travel from city to city reasonably easily, where people are privileged to have a relatively cheap transport system, where people are educated to maybe understand the sort of idea of differences, Why not distinguish museums by doing different things? That seemed to me a very obvious thing. The outsider status began from that observation, because by not showing another Calder or another Kusama exhibition, you're already put outside.
I think it was something that I defined for myself in a way by saying we're going to do something differently. But the Dutch establishment, museum world, said that's not how you should run a museum, it should be the same as we all are. That was one aspect that created that sense of outsider, outsiderness.
Another aspect was simply being in Eindhoven. It is a kind of ridiculed city in a way within the Netherlands, which I understand, it's an industrial city, it has very little charm as a city itself. Eindhoven was essentially an invention of the company Philips and the Philips factory, more or less. It's also not really taken seriously as something that can offer anything beyond a sort of technical innovation. The idea that Eindhoven would have a cultural voice also is something that, from a Dutch point of view, is a little bit absurd.
What it did do, I have to say, it left me with quite a lot of space in order to act in a way that I didn't feel accountable to that Dutch art scene. Initially identifying this idea of being able to be different, because of having an ecosystem of difference rather than the same, and because of being in Eindhoven, I could kind of define more or less our own course as a museum, and place myself on the outside.
If I was initially placed on the outside, because I wasn't playing the right game, I also found it really convenient to play the game of being the outsider in order to be able to do things that they're not doing. So it was a sort of mutual benefit, they would keep me out and I would be happy being kept out.
I think that's how it was for 20 years.
Congolese art collective CATPC enters into dialogue with Van Abbe museum collection, 2024, Photo: Nick Bookelaar
During these 20 years as part of your curatorial approach, you worked across cultures, collaborated with exhibitions in different countries, can you tell us some of the key considerations you took into account?
I think certainly in the initial period, there was a geographic extension. So one of the first exhibitions that we did was actually called EindhovenIstanbul[1]. It was an exhibition that created a sort of imaginary collection of the Istanbul Biennales from 1987 until 2003, the period before our Biennale (9th Istanbul Biennale)[2]. We worked together with Vasıf (Kortun), Esra (Sarıgedik Öktem) and November (Paynter).
It imagined everything that had been shown in that period as a kind of imaginary collection, and then put that in combination with the collection of the museum, which was a real collection. You had an imaginary Istanbul collection and a real Eindhoven collection. We bought the works that had been shown in the previous Biennales, and we put them together to say, what does this tell us? What is included in Istanbul that's not included here? This was again, this idea of what in this very narrow field of sort of North American, Northwest European artists, that was the total focus of the Dutch arts scene. What in that field is being missed?
By only focusing on New York and Paris and a bit of Berlin, or Dusseldorf at the time, or Cologne, what are you missing out on? Then we would show Gülsün Karamustafa, for instance, or other artists like Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, also artists from many different places. Emily Jacir was in the exhibition, because she'd been in the previous Istanbul Biennale in 2003. That was already a sort of an extension of a geography, and also saying that from those geographies, and from those projects like the Istanbul Biennale, the Netherlands has a lot of learning to do.
A lot of understanding that there's something else going on in the art world. I think we continued with that, extending to Eastern Europe, extending to the Middle East, extending to North Africa, ultimately to India and Australia and South America in going through that. And I think that that was important to do.
I remember that one of my colleagues in the state museum at the time was saying, we have three conditions for choosing art for the collection, and they are quality, quality and quality. For me, I was thinking about whose quality, what quality, how can you judge quality when you don't really understand. How can you judge quality if you don't know that the old world that you're maintaining is really profoundly challenged and probably not sustainable?
Peta Clancy, birrarung ba brungergalk, 2023, Van Abbemuseum izniyle
What were some of the challenges you encountered in implementing your approach?
I think one thing is, museums are machines of memory, artistic memory, but also social and historical understandings of the past. Museums are always thinking about the past, because they're also always telling narratives about the past that lead to the present. They might be commissioning new artists and adding to those stories, but they're also putting them in relationship to the past.
I suppose one of the challenges for me, when I first got there, and this was true of the Dutch art scene then, was that the pivotal historical moment that people were talking about was 1968 in Paris, this was the sort of revolutionary moment out of which the art emerged. I came in 2004, and for me, and maybe for my generation, the biggest change was not 1968 anymore. It was 1968 in Paris and not 1968 in Prague, it wasn't connected to the Cold War, it was really connected to this revolutionary moment in Paris. This event, as some philosophers have called it, turned it into this nostalgic, heroic moment.
For my generation, I think, 1989, 1990, and the end of the Cold War, and the changes that shaped, particularly in Europe, was a far more pivotal moment. The end of a sort of communist horizon, and the end of a negotiation with communism that the Dutch and many other American states essentially had to do, had produced the welfare state, and had produced a kind of a social democracy, and that was over.
I think there was very little consciousness then that artists from Poland or from Türkiye were responding to the changes that had happened in 1989. The Dutch were sort of unaware that anything had happened in a way. It felt like it was just like a new business opportunity. They didn't understand that that was a cultural transformation. There was a cultural transformation because there was no communist horizon anymore. There was no possibility of negotiating with capital. Capital could do what it liked.
At the same time, there was a sort of new terrain, which was coping with the wild capitalism of the 1990s. Artists were producing works related to that phenomenon, and not to the old Cold War phenomenon. It was also the coming reality for the Netherlands, the breakdown of the welfare state, the end of a relatively stable population as well, in a certain sense, with people feeling like they were relatively safe and secure. A new world was beginning, and the new world that was beginning was something that artists in Eastern Europe and artists in the Middle East were able to capture and respond to far more quickly than Dutch artists.
So, the first exhibition that we did was with Yael Bartana from Israel, Dan Perjovschi from Romania, and Wilhelm Sasnal from Poland, and that was not a coincidence. That was also like saying that these are actually the artists that are able to say something that's different from that old story. The challenge was to get the team inside the museum to understand that that's the moment we were talking about, and we're responding to that moment. I think that was a real challenge, and I think a lot of people didn't accept it, they wanted the old truth of 89 to be back.
I remember that one of my colleagues in the state museum at the time, was saying, “we have three conditions for choosing art for the collection, and they are quality, quality and quality”. For me, I was thinking about whose quality, what quality, how can you judge quality when you don't really understand. How can you judge quality if you don't know that the old world that you're maintaining is really profoundly challenged and probably not sustainable?
You’ve been the director of Van Abbe for 20 years, in a way, you grew together with the museum. What are important turning points for you during this time?
I would say the turning points for me were more in the way that I curate or the way that I run the museum. I was always in dialogue with a certain kind of theoretical understanding of what the objective was. So it wasn't just a sort of management task, like, how you keep it going, how you keep people happy, or how you balance the budgets.
I always saw art as being, it's both absolutely unimportant, because it has nothing to do with life or death. But it's the one thing that actually remains after everything else has gone from our generation. So when we look back at the empires of the past, it means the Ottoman or the Greek, we tend to remember the products that were produced in the name of art or something related to it. If that's true, then art has a real significance of what we leave behind.
Nobody really remembers the quarterly figures of Phillips in 2021. That's not really something that is very significant at all, even though it seems to be the most important thing at the time. The art that's made in that quarter has absolutely no relevance to Phillips and their obsessions. Actually, what we're going to look back on is the art and not the quarterly numbers. It has something which goes beyond the day to day survival mechanisms of capital, or the day to day management of a group of people and trying to keep them happy.
That touches on the museum for sure. Museums are an enterprise but you need to have some relationship with the biggest sense of where you're going, what the horizon is. I suppose, a sort of Marxist analysis based on a sort of historical materialism. The art produces these objects, and these objects tell stories about the world and that's how we understand it. We understand it through economic motivations, through class motivations, and these objects are related to the social phenomenon of what our position is in the world and how we can change that.
I think moving from a sort of Marxist analysis to a decolonial analysis was really a profound turning point, because it meant that you looked at the museum very differently. Rather than looking at the museum as an instrument to sort of demonstrate class conflicts, to demonstrate the inequalities of the world in economic terms, you look at the museum as a way of demonstrating the colonial wound.
That really sort of radically shifts the artists that you're looking at, the kind of topics that you might cover, but even the self understanding of the museum. When you start to bring in a decolonial lens, the fact that the founder of Van Abbemuseum was a capitalist, the fact that he's working with tobacco, suddenly become hugely more significant, because tobacco is a colonial product, and tobacco is a production of the plantation, and the plantation is then something which comes into view. Before, it was just a sort of generic idea of “capitalism”. Now, it's a very specific colonial idea of our dependence on colonial exploitation and plantations in Indonesia. Suddenly, we started to research that story. Suddenly, Van Abbe becomes not just a sort of obscure capital, he becomes really a figure of the system of colonialism, and the museum's dependence and museum's existence is dependent upon that. That's really interesting. Then why does he grow tobacco in Indonesia? What are the cultures of Indonesia that have been erased by colonial ignorance? Suddenly, Indonesian artists become far more significant to the Van Abbe Museum than they ever would do. Once you do that, then you start to think about Suriname, then you start to think about the Dutch empire.
Then you also start thinking about the empires that are close at hand, the Belgian, the French and the British. Who are the artists who are dealing with those histories? So The Otolith group[3] came in, CATPC[4] (Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise) came in to help us understand what our shared colonial systems were, and how we can heal the wounds that have been created by them, and how we can address them.
Without that decolonial focus, CATPC would be impossible. It's not a sort of 180-degree switch, but the focus changes and then the artists who are working with those things suddenly come up. I think that's the kind of turning point, which then really changes what you're programming and how you're thinking and the conversations you have with artists.
Do you feel like you’ve accomplished your objectives during this time?
I don't think you ever feel you accomplish objectives. I think, if I look at the collection, some of these things that I'm talking about are definitely encoded in the collections. I remember I spoke at an early stage about shifting from collecting objects to collecting relations. That also, in the end, collecting relations became a bit problematic. So I said gathering relations. For instance, we bought a project by Sandi Hilal called The Living Room, which was a project where migrants, often people that have no rights in the Netherlands, because they've been refused asylum, could come into the museum and be hosts and meet the visitors of the museum. It's a very sort of animated and active project. The fact that that's in the collection is for me very important.
I don't think it would have been possible 20 years ago. I think that it's not that it's been a complete failure, no. But I think that the accomplishments have also been mitigated by the sense that I could have done it better, for sure.
The way people talk about the museum, both in the Netherlands and in Istanbul, is remarkable. That in itself must feel like a success. After all, if it weren’t for the connections you built internationally, we wouldn’t be discussing a museum in Eindhoven all the way in Istanbul. Those efforts clearly made an impact, and from my perspective, that’s a great achievement.
I am happy to hear it, I hope that we paid respect to the art scenes that were in places like Istanbul, and that we treated them fairly. That for sure feels like something like that changed the museum.
Based on our conversation above, we can say that Van Abbe is a very attractive museum for international audiences. After 20 years, do you think you can also say that for the Dutch audience? Do you think there has been a shift of interest towards eastern countries for the Dutch art lovers?
I think there has been a change in the question of diversity and a more youthful public, a less bourgeois public, a more diverse public in terms of ethnicity, in terms of background, and education. That's definitely been achieved by the museum.
I think that the sector was traumatised by the budget cuts that were imposed by the government almost entirely during my period in the Netherlands. Because they were done in such a cruel and spiteful way, rather than saying “we're sorry but we have to cut you because we have economic problems”. They said, “we really enjoy cutting you because you're people that eat up subsidies without any concerns for accountability, and that you're people that are all hobbyists, white people can just read a novel they can buy in the airport, and that's enough culture for Dutch people”. That was kind of the attitude that was present in the government. I think it caused quite a lot of trauma within the field.
I'm not sure I see the field fully recovered from that, because I think they've become very wary. That's probably a good thing in some ways, very wary of the government and what the government wants, even though culture is dependent on the government. There is a bad relationship because it feels like politics only uses culture as an object to hit in order to get votes from people who hate it, and who doesn't have a value, in terms of bringing people together, in terms of social cohesion, in terms of the culture itself, the pleasure of going to an exhibition, and in terms of education. All of those things, you would understand as having value, the politics sees it as elitist or irrelevant, or just exploitative hardworking Dutch people, and what they really need is more cars, and what they really need is more food, or whatever.
I think the process affected also the public’s reception for art, because people also hear that from politicians that culture is irrelevant, and just a luxury, an unnecessary luxury. You're constantly battling against that. Now, the good thing is that politicians are less and less respected, and so their opinions are less and less valuable. That is also a breakdown of trust in politics in a way. So I think there's definitely a change in the public.
There's also, as in everything in the last 20 years, a loss of trust between people, a loss of relation between people, there's more fragmentation, individualisation, exhalation, and culture is countering those forces, but it doesn't have the power to do so. If you've got an economic system, like social media, which wants to create fragmentation, and you've got a political system, which sees an advantage in fragmentation in getting more power or more votes. It disregards culture as something that can bring people together.
This is very true but also very negative…
I do think there's been a positive aspect. That's definitely observable, more people go to museums than before. But I think that the atmosphere around culture is much more toxic than it was in the past. This is particularly because of these cuts in 2011. I think they came from this political position, which is that culture is a waste of time, basically.
I'm, at the moment, attracted by this metaphor of “fermentation”. The museum is like the pot where the fermentation happens. It has to happen in the dark, it has to be put away. You sometimes bury it in some cultures, so it's not that it has to be the spectacular moment, but actually, the fermentation itself happens. Then you reveal something else, what was put into the pot in the dark is transformed.
Art is a Verb, Van Abbemuseum, 2024. Photo: Cleo Goossens
In relation to your comment, how do you see the future of museums today considering the current worldwide economic, social and political turmoil as well as the impact of digital platforms and innovations in AI?
I am not super optimistic, I have to say, like 1945 did happen, in the end, the war stopped, and we turned it around, so we'll get to that point. The question for me is how dark it will get before it gets light. There's an optimism in that. There's also a worry about how deep we will go. I think that the museum's role, interestingly, has changed in my period of time, from one that was more about provoking quite a complacent society, to being more healing and bringing together different communities that are so fragmented and forced apart from each other.
If you have a sort of a complacent, self satisfied society, which I think the Netherlands was in 2004, all the problems were solved, history as well, we just needed to just keep going in the way we're going and more liberal democracy and everything will be happy. Now, obviously, that's an absurd prognosis.
Then it was necessary to provoke people and say, no, look at these inequalities, look at the struggles, look at the unfairness of your supposed utopia of the end of history. There were exhibitions about utopia, then there was really this idea that utopia had already arrived. It was clear, if you looked around the world, that that wasn't true.
Nevertheless, that was what Western Europe and maybe North America, where everybody's obviously conscious of the polarisation and the division and the fragmentation and the violence and aggression, so you need to be healing in that context.
If you change from education to healing, you need to change your strategies. I think that's about bringing communities together. One of the great moments for me recently, even after I left, actually, the last exhibition that I opened, when the grandniece of Balot[5], who'd been killed by the Pende people who are related to Ceausescu in the 1930s, that she met with representatives from the community that had suffered colonial exploitation and rape and murder. They actually were able to speak to each other. That was a kind of moment of healing, because you can't change the past, but you can decide not to do it again.
In many ways, in the political field, we're doing colonialism all over again. The violence and the extraction and the rapes and murders that follow are actually on the agenda of many political players at the moment, in North America, in Russia, also in smaller ways in Europe, in Hungary, the Netherlands itself with (Geert) Wilders and (Thierry) Baudet.
That's the worry, and in that context, I think the museum should try as long as they can, to hold a space where people can come together and where that healing can be carried out and where you can see the work of artists from the other exhibitions. In our other exhibition, there are artists from the Sakha Republic, which is in the far east of Siberia. It seems to me important that you can actually see a different kind of Russia from the one that the government, the Russian federation government wants to project.
We did a big exhibition of Gülsün Karamustafa together with León Ferrari, both of whom had struggled with their governments in Türkiye and in Argentina. It was important for people to see that it's possible that museums are not things that we need to ignore, but that they are real cultural agencies that people can have even in those situations. We can learn how to have cultural agency in an oppressive situation, which will come to the Netherlands or is coming to the Netherlands already.
In that sense, it's important that we've managed this sort of internationalism, and that we’ve made a difference. It's always on an individual level, but I think it's true that you've made people see things that maybe they didn't want to see, but they can't unsee.
I completely agree that the arts in general, and museums in particular, make a real difference when they focus on healing. As you mentioned earlier, it’s not just about collecting objects but about gathering relationships, bringing people together and encouraging reflection on the past, present, and future. In the end, we may not expect too much from a museum, but its role in connecting people and initiating conversation is invaluable.
I'm, at the moment, attracted by this metaphor of fermentation, that the museum is like the pot where the fermentation happens. It has to happen in the dark, it has to be put away. You sometimes bury it in some cultures, so it's not that it has to be a spectacular moment, but actually the fermentation itself happens. Then you reveal something else, what was put into the pot in the dark is transformed.
Maybe art has that role of being something that transforms and changes society after a period of time. What we're doing now in working with contemporary artists is really establishing the fermentation process that will have an effect in the future. Kind of like artist fermentation, I kind of quite like that at the moment.
If there was a sort of farewell, it was this internationalism, which goes beyond the art, this idea of the colonial and how do we heal it? This idea of how does the museum become a space in Eindhoven, where the activist communities and the artistic communities that are not in this sort of old-fashioned sense, dedicated to art, but actually much more interested in activating the city, and in finding a place in the city where they can do things that are not necessarily commercial and not necessarily only about selling their design to a big company.
Regarding your last exhibitions, do you see them as a “farewell note” highlighting your curatorial approach and personal view on arts?
There are, in my mind, three last exhibitions. The first and maybe the most important for me was Soils[6]. Soils was an exhibition, which demonstrated this sort of attempt to break certain boundaries, geographically working together with Australia, with Colombia, with Mexico, with Indonesia, with Romania and with Brabant, to bring the local and the international in relation.
There were wonderful moments at the opening where I saw farmers from just outside Eindhoven, talking to farmers from Mexico, and exchanging experiences. The other thing that was really important about Soils was that the participants were not all artists, they were also farmers and activists, cultural healers, people that had knowledge of their own culture in Colombia, for instance, they had tried to keep intact from colonial erasure. Those people were there in the exhibition and were part of the exhibition. It wasn't only an exhibition of art, but it was an exhibition of what art can do in a wider field, and how it can affect people who don't necessarily claim themselves to be artists or haven't been trained as artists. That was for me, a kind of a farewell, a culmination.
These are the points as you can go towards healing, you can go towards agriculture, as well as culture. You can go towards a non-specialist disciplinary idea of art and towards art as a tool that can affect things far beyond it.
I'm particularly happy with the project of Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson[7] (The Rehabilitation of The Invisible House: Chapter 1, as part of the exhibition titled Art is a Verb) because that really motivated the Eindhoven community. If there was a sort of farewell, it was this internationalism, which goes beyond the art, this idea of the colonial and how do we heal it? (Two Sides of the Coin exhibition). This idea of how does the museum become a space in Eindhoven, where the activist communities and the artistic communities that are not in this sort of old-fashioned sense, dedicated to art, but actually much more interested in activating the city, and in finding a place in the city where they can do things that are not necessarily commercial and not necessarily only about selling their design to a big company, that how can we strengthen them? Can the museum, as a big institution within the city, be a base from which they feel they can get a louder voice? I think that's something that Libia and Ólafur have done in that work.
I suppose that a relation to Eindhoven, a relation to international relations, the colonial, are in those last three projects, and those are a reasonable legacy to leave.
My favourite was also Libia and Ólafur’s work. I kind of found many familiar things that we have been experiencing in Istanbul, also in many other cities across Türkiye. We are losing our heritage, collective memories with each careless reconstruction. We sometimes have a chance to talk about them in an exhibition, in a biennial. It's a nice feeling to see that connection, I really felt for them.
I'm happy to say, strangely, Libia and Ólafur and I met in Istanbul, in 2004 or 2005. Now they're back in the museum, but it all started in Istanbul.
I think we need to have independent sources of money. We need to think in our sector about how we can produce the money that comes through the sale of art, that comes through the public sector, but make clear that we don't want any controls on it. Money that maybe comes through a kind of cooperative agency between artists and curators and others that can be funded through different sources, even through selling products. Maybe, going back to that early form of capitalism of competition and of the market. We need to explore those levels and not worry so much about the government, because it's already too late for that.
Left: D Harding, As I remember it (The Soils Project), 2023, Courtesy of Van Abbemuseum Right: Congolese art collective CATPC enters into dialogue with Van Abbe museum collection, 2024, Photo: Nick Bookelaar
In Istanbul and across Türkiye, we also have been witnessing unhealthy “growth” of cities where growth is only associated with economy, real estate and number of tourists. I read your comment on the growth of Eindhoven where you underlined the fact that “Maybe you need more of the human side.” In Türkiye we have examples like Baksı Museum, OMM - Odunpazarı Modern Museum, which are playing a crucial role in investing in the “emotional growth” of the cities they are based in. Can you please let us know your view on the impact of museums, art in general on creating humanistic growth?
I think one of the interesting things about real estate is that the United States president is basically a real estate person. You can see that real estate and technology, which are the driving forces in Eindhoven now, are also the driving forces in many other places. What you see there, I think it's really interesting. One thing you see is that the ASML, which has taken over the role of Philips, has nothing of the social responsibility that Philips had. That's not necessarily mean bad people are at the top, having no interest in culture, but they are forced by the economic system of shareholders not to have any interest in Eindhoven.
The system itself mitigates against the idea of taking care of the workers or developing the city or investing in the cultural infrastructure in the city. That's a problem we should ask, like, why do we have a company that makes huge amounts of profit, when none of it feeds back into the place where they're extracting from. We're placed in that technology with a violently extractive economic model, with no social responsibility whatsoever. Less even than the capitalists of the previous generations.
The system really needs to be questioned. That system also is the sort of safety of the investment in real estate, which is really interesting because it goes back to this idea of land, no? Because real estate is also land.
Historically before industrialisation, wealth was understood in terms of land. Yanis Varoufakis has talked about that (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism), what we have is a kind of technofeudalism coming back in which these technologists convert their profits into ownership of land. They become like the lords of the old days with these sorts of huge territories, which they control, maybe in the name of somebody else. In a way, the idea of capital that we might respect or might be interested in innovation, competition, developing potentially helpful technologies or helpful products that can improve human life, is off the table to a large extent. Agriculture still happens, these old models survive, but basically it's no longer where the action is. The action is in this technofeudalism, real estate, and economy.
We are not really at the stage of understanding how to oppose that at all. I think that museums have to be places where resistance starts to build and an awareness, that's what Libia and Ólafur are doing. It's not only the sort of colonialism of the past, but it's also this technofeudalism, which has a relation to some extent to this idea of extraction, exploitation of land that we need. The analysis that we need to have and to share is the task of universities for sure, of the alternative media that still exists, and of museums and cultural institutions. This analysis of Yanis Varoufakis applies to Eindhoven in an interesting way because of ASML and historically Philips, and the way the public interest, the so-called democratic system, is simply in service of technofeudalism.
It's absurd. Where is the resistance to that? First, we need to have an understanding of it, because you can't resist it unless you know what you're fighting and then the resistance can be mobilised.
I see it as one place where museums can do so. The problem is that they're dependent on public money and the technofeudalists. So you're fighting the people that are also saying they're giving you the money in a way. That's a very tricky one.
I think that's partly why I left, because I couldn't square that circle.
I think we need to have independent sources of money. We need to think in our sector about how we can produce the money that comes through the sale of art, that comes through the public sector, but make clear that we don't want any controls on it. Money that maybe comes through a kind of cooperative agency between artists and curators and others that can be funded through different sources, even through selling products. Maybe, going back to that early form of capitalism of competition and of the market. We need to explore those levels and not worry so much about the government, because it's already too late for that.
You moved to Amsterdam to do your PhD and you will establish an experimental station for art and life in Romania. Can you tell us more about your project in Romania?
I'm working together with people that have already established it. I'm becoming a contributor to the experimental station. Buying some land to contribute to the commons, also to help with developing projects and fundraising. So it's really to try and build a space for art and life from the ground. Literally, we have a field, and we build it from there. They've been doing it for about three years, and I've joined them now.
I feel that there's a sense of possibility in Romania, which I don't feel in the Netherlands.
What I experienced the last years in the Netherlands was this sort of immediate reaction of people when you come up with a new idea, which is a good idea, usually, but we can't do it. We can't do it because it's against the law. Then if you argue that it's not against the law, then it's okay, but there's no money. Then if you say, well, we can get some money, then they say, well, the politicians won't like it. There are these sorts of three gates that everything has to pass through. And by the time it's passed through that, I partly have lost interest. And partly, it's become so watered down that it no longer has the energy that it needs in order to deliver the project. I think this is people's cautiousness of what the consequences would be of everything dominating the idea of taking a risk. If we avoid risk in art, it's really no longer worth it. I don't sense that same fear of risk in Romania as I do in the Netherlands, which has become so risk averse.
Are you still connected with the art world in Türkiye? Do you have any plans to engage in any projects?
Not directly. I mean, I would love to, and I'm still close with Vasıf (Kortun) and my old collaborators, Esra (Sarıgedik Öktem), as well. So I'd definitely be interested in it.
I hope we will see you in Istanbul, you know, with a project sometime soon.
Me too. Let's hope. It would be lovely.
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