Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968) is a Swiss art curator, critic, and art historian.

He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London.

Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews.

He is also co-editor of the Cahiers d'Art review.

He lives and works in London.

Obrist was born in Weinfelden, Switzerland on May 24, 1968.

Obrist first gained art world attention at the age 23 in 1991, when as a student in Politics and Economics in St. Gallen, Switzerland, he mounted an exhibition in the kitchen of his apartment entitled The Kitchen Show It featured work by Christian Boltanski and Peter Fischli & David Weiss.

Some of his early projects Obrist curated for the art initiative museum in progress in Vienna, for example the legendary exhibition museum in progress with Alighiero Boetti on board of Austrian Airlines in 1993 (using images from Boetti's “Airplanes” series, both in every in-flight magazine and as a free jigsaw puzzle, given to passengers), Interventions in the daily newspaper Der Standard 1995 with artists like Christian Marclay, Matt Mullican and Lawrence Weiner, and Travelling Eye in the magazine Profil 1995/1996 with John Baldessari, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Gerhard Richter amongst others.

In 1993, Obrist founded the Museum Robert Walser and began to run the Migrateurs program at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris where he served as a curator for contemporary art.

In 1996, he co-curated Manifesta 1, the first edition of the roving European biennial of contemporary art.

He began publishing these interviews in Artforum in 1996 and in 2003 eleven of these interviews were released as Interviews Volume 1.

Obrist has also been a jury member of the art project Safety Curtain, which museum in progress has been realizing at the Vienna State Opera with famous artists like Tauba Auerbach, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Jeff Koons, Maria Lassnig, Rosemarie Trockel, Cy Twombly and Carrie Mae Weems since 1998.

Over the years, nearly 2000 hours of interviews have been recorded, which he refers to as "an endless conversation".

In 2003, Obrist curated "Utopia Station" (a section of the Venice Biennale) and was briefly interviewed about the project in Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World.

By 2005, The Guardian reported that Obrist had interviewed to succeed Philip Dodd as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

More recently, Obrist initiated a series of "marathons", a series of public events he conceived in Stuttgart in 2005.

In 2006, Serpentine Galleries director Julia Peyton-Jones appointed Obrist as her co-director of exhibitions and programs.

The first in the Serpentine series, the Interview Marathon in 2006, involved interviews with leading figures in contemporary culture over 24 hours, conducted by Obrist and architect Rem Koolhaas.

While maintaining official curatorial positions, Obrist is also the co-founder of the Brutally Early Club, a discussion group open to all that meets at Starbucks in London, Berlin, New York and Paris at 6:30 a.m. In 2007, Obrist co-curated Il Tempo del Postino with Philippe Parreno for the Manchester International Festival, also presented at Art Basel, 2009, organised by Fondation Beyeler and Theater Basel.

This was followed by the Experiment Marathon, conceived by Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson in 2007, which included 50 experiments by speakers across both arts and science, including Peter Cook, Neil Turok, Kim Gordon, Simone Forti, Fia Backstrom and Joseph Grigely.

In 2008 he curated Everstill at the Lorca House in Granada.

There was also the Manifesto Marathon in 2008 and the Poetry Marathon in 2009, which consisted of poems read aloud by artists and writers including Gilbert & George, Tracey Emin, Nick Laird, Geoffrey Hill, and James Fenton.

Volume 2 was published in Summer 2010.

With the release, a total of 69 artists, architects, writers, film-makers, scientists, philosophers, musicians and performers share their unique experiences and frank insights.

Obrist has also published a series of books called "The Conversation Series," which features the longer interviews in his archive.

To date, 28 books have been published, each containing a lengthy interview with cultural figures including John Baldessari, Zaha Hadid, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Yoko Ono, Robert Crumb and Rem Koolhaas.

A number of Obrist's interviews have also appeared in the Berlin culture magazine 032c, including those with artists Elaine Sturtevant and Richard Hamilton, historian Eric Hobsbawm, and structural engineer Cecil Balmond of Arup.

In 2013, Obrist co-founded with Simon Castets the 89plus, a long-term, international, multi-platform research project with support from Google, conceived as a mapping of the digitally native generation born in or after 1989.

In 2014, Obrist curated the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, where he presented Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price; the building was designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, and the program was developed with artists Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Tino Sehgal and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.

In 2022, Obrist organized a Jota Mombaça performance staged on San Giacomo in Paludo to kick off the construction of an arts space operated by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.

Obrist's interest in interviews was first triggered during his student years when he read two extensive conversations.

The first was between Pierre Cabanne and Marcel Duchamp, while the second was between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon.

"These books somehow brought me to art," he has said.

"They were like oxygen, and were the first time that the idea of an interview with an artist as a medium became of interest to me. They also sparked my interest in the idea of sustained conversations—of interviews recorded over a period of time, perhaps over the course of many years; the Bacon/Sylvester interviews took place over three long sessions, for example."

The 2014 Extinction Marathon: Visions of the Future linked the humanities and the sciences to discussions of environmental and human impact on the world today.

It was programmed with artist Gustav Metzger whose research addresses issues of extinction and climate change.

Notable participants included artists Etel Adnan, Ed Atkins, Jesse Darling, Gilbert & George, Katja Novitskova, Yoko Ono, Susan Hiller, Marguerite Humeau, Trevor Paglen, Cornelia Parker amongst notable model and actor Lily Cole and founder of The Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of The Long Now Foundation Stewart Brand.

Obrist is an advocate and archivist for artists, and has said: "I really do think artists are the most important people on the planet, and if what I do is a utility and helps them, then that makes me happy. I want to be helpful."

Since Peyton-Jones left the organization in 2016, Obrist has worked alongside successive co-directors Yana Peel (2016–2019) and Bettina Korek (since 2019).

In addition to his role as the Serpentine Galleries, Obrist has been the international programs advisor to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (since 2018) and the artistic adviser to The Shed in New York (since 2018).