Nicolas Bourriaud

Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a French curator and art critic, who has curated a great number of exhibitions and biennials all over the world.

Bourriaud was the Paris correspondent for Flash Art (1987–1995) and the founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art (1992–2000).

Relational Aesthetics in particular has come to be seen as a defining text for a wide variety of art produced by a generation who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1990s.

He was also one of the 13 co-curators of the “Aperto” section of the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Bourriaud coined the term in 1995, in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition Traffic that was shown at the CAPC contemporary art museum in Bordeaux.

Bourriaud is best known among English speakers for his publications Relational Aesthetics (1998/English version 2002), Postproduction (2001), and The Exform (2015/ English version 2016).

With Jérôme Sans, Bourriaud cofounded the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where he served as codirector from 1999 to 2006.

In Postproduction (2001), Bourriaud relates deejaying to contemporary art.

During his time at Palais de Tokyo, he also served on the team behind the first and second editions of the Moscow Biennial, in 2005 and 2007, respectively.

Bourriaud was the Gulbenkian curator of contemporary art from 2007 to 2010 at Tate Britain in London.

In 2009 he curated the fourth Tate Triennial, titled Altermodern.

Radicant (2009) aims to define the emergence of the first global modernity, based on translation and nomadic forms, against the postmodern aesthetics based on identities.

Bourriaud was the Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, an art school in Paris, France, from 2011 to 2015.

During his time in office, he organized the 2011 edition of the Athens Biennale, the 2014 edition of the Taipei Biennial, and the 2015 edition of the Kaunas Biennial.

In 2014, he was part of the selection committee that chose Giuseppe Penone, Nedko Solakov and Liam Gillick as the winners of the European Central Bank’s international competition for site-specific artworks at its new premises.

By 2015, he was dismissed from his post by the city, for “reasons related to a change of direction,” according to a Facebook status posted by Bourriaud at the time.)

In 2015, Bourriaud was appointed director of the La Panacée art centre (a.k.a. MO.CO.PANACÉE) and the director of the Contemporary Art Center of Montpellier, France (aka MO.CO.); In 2018, he joined a group of arts professionals — among them the artists Christian Boltanski and Jean-Luc Moulène – in signing an open letter published by the newspaper Libération, calling on the city of Paris to abandon the installation of Bouquet of Tulips by Jeff Koons.

By 2021, he was ousted as director of MO.CO.

after months of growing political tensions between Bourriaud and the city’s mayor, Michaël Delafosse.

In The Exform (2016), Bourriaud examines the dynamics of ideology, specifically as it was developed in the work of Louis Althusser, to account for distinctions between the productive and unproductive, product and waste, and the included and excluded in their relation to society and art production.