Final month, Juliane Bischoff took over as curator for Portikus, the essential Frankfurt establishment identified for its influential exhibitions on modern artwork. Portikus is the Kunsthalle of the famend Städelschule and has hosted important exhibits by the likes of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Martin Kippenberger, Isa Genzken, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Danh Vo, Simon Starling and Anne Imhof. Bischoff involves Portikus from Klosterruine Berlin and we caught up along with her to listen to extra about her plans for the establishment.
Congratulations on the brand new job! What are a few of your early priorities for it?
Thanks. In the meanwhile, I’m creating this system for the subsequent two years, which includes initiating conversations with artists, but in addition rigorously contemplating the tempo of this system and its modes of handle. Whereas Portikus has a long-standing dedication to site-specific commissions and spatial interventions, I’m eager to additional increase codecs corresponding to efficiency, movie and discursive occasions so as to activate totally different registers of notion and engagement.
On the similar time, I’m reflecting on sustainability and on how long-term collaborations with different establishments would possibly help inventive practices past the lifespan of a single exhibition. I’m significantly drawn to site-responsive approaches that domesticate an attentiveness to position, atmosphere and historic layers, but usually are not confined to singular initiatives. By grounding exact interventions in particular contexts whereas situating them inside broader international circumstances, these practices can generate dialogues that reach throughout locations and time. Given the pressing challenges of our time—rising nationalism, ongoing wars, extractive capitalism and accelerating local weather crises—it feels essential to bolster pluralistic types of discourse that transfer throughout borders.
From 2023 to 2025, you had been inventive director of Klosterruine Berlin. What are the variations between curating in Frankfurt versus Berlin?
Each locations have a really particular context. Portikus brings collectively practically forty years of exhibition historical past, intently entwined with the Städelschule, whereas Klosterruine Berlin occupies the stays of a former monastery church and has functioned as a city-run, outside exhibition area solely since 2016. Each venues are freed from cost and accessible to a broad public, but their operational circumstances differ considerably. Klosterruine Berlin is extremely constrained when it comes to capability, follows a seasonal rhythm and operates totally on a neighborhood degree, with public area as its curatorial area—albeit inside Berlin’s dense panorama of venture areas, establishments and galleries. This affords a vivid discourse, one that’s presently below severe risk resulting from drastic cuts in public funding.
Portikus, against this, has constantly championed experimental inventive practices throughout media and generations. It has launched artists at pivotal early moments whereas additionally participating figures whose work continues to form modern discourse. The establishment occupies a novel place between public exhibition area, pedagogical framework and worldwide artwork context. The artwork college is a part of its infrastructural framework and an essential level of reference, whereas the establishment maintains a powerful worldwide outlook. My strategy is to construct connections between native audiences and the worldwide context current throughout the scholar physique and the town, whereas additionally introducing practices, narratives and views that haven’t but, or solely partially, been seen in Frankfurt.
What are a few of your favourite previous exhibitions at Portikus?
There are such a lot of! I take pleasure in returning to them repeatedly. From the interval within the former constructing at Schöne Aussicht, and contemplating the historic second of their presentation, exhibitions by Isa Genzken (1993), Wolfgang Tillmans (1995), Steve McQueen (1997) and Renée Inexperienced (2002) stand out. Within the present constructing, which has existed since 2006, I’m significantly keen on exhibitions by Judith Hopf and Henrik Olesen, Lutz Bacher, Lucy Raven, Willem de Rooij, Pope.L and Simone Fattal, amongst others. I used to be additionally deeply impressed by the methods during which Michael Stevenson, Azad Raza and Adrian Piper engaged with the structure and spatial logic of the constructing.
Moreover, Helke Bayrle’s movie archive, titled “Portikus below building,” is a rare physique of labor in its personal proper. Between 1993 and 2002, she documented the development of exhibitions at Portikus. The ensuing movies usually are not merely information of exhibits or portraits of artists, however intimate and subjective observations of artistic processes. Right now, this archive is accessible on-line and stays a useful doc of the establishment’s historical past.
Portikus is the Kunsthalle of the Frankfurt-based Städelschule. How does this relationship have an effect on its curation?
The Städelschule is foundational to Portikus; the exhibition area was established by Kasper König in 1987 exactly on this context. Since 2024, Barbara Clausen has served as rector of the Städelschule and director of Portikus and we’re in shut dialogue about the right way to additional articulate the alternate between the 2 establishments. Whereas professors from the college have introduced solo exhibitions at Portikus up to now, we’re additionally exploring the reverse route: inviting artists exhibiting at Portikus to interact with the college by workshops, lectures or visitor professorships. This is able to enable for sustained encounters with inventive practices and foster deeper types of alternate with college students. Past this, college students are actively concerned within the set up and mediation of exhibitions, which feeds again into curatorial pondering on each sensible and pedagogical ranges.
Portikus has been identified for formative early or mid-career exhibitions that later formed broader modern artwork discourse, exhibiting essential early exhibits by artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Thomas Hirschhorn and Pierre Huyghe. How do you retain forward of the curve, how does a curator anticipate what tendencies in artwork are going to go on to be influential?
Portikus affords a uncommon diploma of freedom—to check new concepts, to take dangers and to unsettle established codecs. Many exhibitions mark moments in an artist’s apply when one thing sudden is introduced into focus. As a curator, I see my function in encouraging this course of: making certain that artists have time and assets, whereas additionally reflecting collectively on why a selected gesture or inquiry feels pressing within the current second. I consider that sustained collaborations between artists and establishments generate results that reach far past a single exhibition. In that sense, I’m much less involved with anticipating tendencies than with remaining attentive to the circumstances of the current—how they form our methods of seeing artwork and the way artwork, in flip, reshapes our understanding of the world.
You lately curated a present with Hiwa Ok, Tarik Kiswanson, Selma Selman, Hito Steyerl, Sung Tieu, Miloš Trakilović and Ian Waelder. What do these artists have in widespread for you?
These works got here collectively inside a really particular framework, the Documentation Centre for the Historical past of Nationwide Socialism in Munich. The exhibition addressed a pluralistic (post-)migrant European collective reminiscence, asking how experiences of conflict, displacement and loss since 1945 have formed, and proceed to complicate, dominant historic narratives. The artists approached these questions from the views of subsequent generations, probing which histories have been overwritten by political energy, marginalized or silenced. Whereas Europe’s nations stay globally militarized, the consequences of those conflicts are suppressed by ever-stricter border regimes. The exhibited works resist reductive storytelling, tracing connections with out flattening particular circumstances and insisting on distinction. Artwork is an act of creation and these practices don’t merely think about different futures, however ask how the current could be rendered livable for all.
How can Portikus increase its place as an area for inventive threat whereas remaining rooted in Frankfurt’s public sphere?
I don’t see this as a contradiction. Frankfurt is an internationally linked metropolis—not solely by international monetary networks, however by its inhabitants and layered migration histories. There are excellent collections and museums, such because the MMK and Schirn Kunsthalle, that current acclaimed worldwide artists. And with Portikus, the understanding that artwork frequently challenges the varieties it may possibly take appears effectively established.
Inside this panorama, I see Portikus as an integral a part of a pluralistic city cloth. On the similar time, modern socio-political pressures are putting immense pressure on areas of democratic openness, together with cultural establishments. Collaborations with native and worldwide companions may help handle these challenges by initiating decentralized processes of transformation and enabling transversal types of alternate. By situating my curatorial apply throughout these totally different scales, I hope to develop a program that resonates each regionally and internationally, whereas remaining attentive to the urgencies of the current.
