JENS HOFFMANN is a curator and writer based in San Francisco. He is the Director of the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts and an associate professor at the Curatorial Practice program of the California College of the Arts.
Prospect 1 Biennial, New Orleans
The new, big Biennial in United States was an extraordinary experience on many levels. Not only did the artists create magnificent site-specific work, but one also got to see and feel New Orleans' history and its difficult and complex contemporary realities. My personal artistic highlight of the exhibition was Mark Bradford's gigantic arch made of used billboards and placed on a vacant spot in the Lower Ninth
Ward. Spending Halloween on Bourbon Street after the opening was another trip altogether.
Anyspacewhatever, Guggenheim, New York
While it might be hard to make sense of this artistically and politically complex exhibition it was wonderful to see this group of artists finally getting central stage in a mayor US art institution.
Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Carsten Hoeller, Maurizio Cattelan, Angela Bulloch, Douglas Gordon, Rirkrit Tiravanja, Jorge Pardo and Pierre Huyghe, friends for more then a
decade conceived the exhibition collaboratively with the curator Nancy Spector. The publication is an important historical document of their activities, containing texts on all the artists and all their mayor
projects.
States of Exchange: Artists from Cuba, INIVA, London
We have gotten used to see art from Latin America, yet rarely do we get the chance to see contemporary art from Cuba without having to travel to this mayor Caribbean island. Highlights included the works of Wilfredo Prieto and Yoan and Ivan Capote and film and video program featuring the work of over 20 young Cuban artists.
Italics, Palazzo Grassi, Venice
This outstanding and superbly installed overview show bringing together master pieces of Italian art since 1968 curated by Francesco Bonami felt like an exhibition equivalent to a movie by Michelangelo
Antonioni: deeply melancholic and extremely existential.
Catherine Opie: American Photographer, Guggenheim, New York
I have been fascinated by the work of Cathy Opie for years, yet this show took my admiration to a new level. The juxtaposition of her ice fishing series and her photographs of surfers was magnificent. For the first time ever did I get the chance to see her freeway photographs in real and it blew me away, it was the personal discovery of a masterpiece.
Phantom Sightings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Long over due, this overview exhibition brought together art from a young generation of Mexican-American artist living in the West and the South-West of the United States. I saw the exhibition about five times taking every friend of mine who visited LA to see the exhibition. Finding its starting point in art that is generally associated with the Chicano movement the exhibition looked into the post-chicano realities of most younger Mexican-American and Latino artist in the United States that do not necessarily identify themselves through their ethnicity or the color of their skin but through sharing a
specific reality in the Southern border regions of this country.
Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju
Some of the most important exhibitions of the last ten years have been curated by the artistic director of this year's Gwangju Biennial, Okwui Enwesor. What might be the most unusual and complex exhibition of the year was also the most demanding. Enwesor and his collaborators did not make it easy for the audiences and included only a few well known names. They created a temporary school and brought a number of overlooked and smaller exhibitions from around the world to South Korea to move away from the Biennial as blockbuster towards the Biennial as a source for intellectual and artistic inspiration.
Martin Kippenberger, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
After having seen the Kippenberger retrospective in London in 2006 it was a wonderful experience to see a completely different take on his work at MOCA in LA. An extremely well researched, well displayed exhibition that featured a large amount of some of Kippenberger's most powerful works ranging from drawings, posters, paintings, sculptures to large scale installations. The wonderfully designed catalogue of the show offers the most comprehensive analysis of his work to date.
Tino Sehgal, Fondazione Trussardi, Milan
One of Sehgal's largest exhibitions to date, this show at the Villa Reale, a museum exhibiting Italian art from the 19th century, brought together eight works of the artist that could all be experienced in different rooms and floors of the museum simultaneously. The setting created a particularly spectacular aura for the works, which are usually mostly shown in neural white cube spaces. Here they wonderfully dialoged with the rooms and the old master paintings.
28th Sao Paulo Biennial
A controversial show since the announcement of its radical concept, not to show any works of art and to leave the exhibition space of the hugh Biennial pavilion empty for talks, a library, film programs and
performances. While the idea of the void was later reconsidered and art works were shown, the central space of the Biennial was empty as a space of future potential and to demonstrate the political as well as economical difficulties of, not only the Sao Paulo Biennial, but Biennials around the globe.
Cildo Mereiles, Tate Modern, London
This retrospective of Brazilian conceptualist Mereiles was simply the most beautiful and most intriguing show Tate Modern as ever realized.
An Unruly History of the Readymade, Jumex Collection, Mexico City
Curator Jessica Morgan picked up on Latin American art's fascination with the idea of the readymade and curated a show with works from the renowned Jumex Collection that traced the influence of Duchamp on Modern and Contemporary Art, all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. A special treat was the installation: all works were placed on a chessboard like grid as if playing a game of chess with exactly the same space available for each piece.
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