INSIDE/OUT: Nicolas Bourriaud - Expanded Relational Aesthetics

30 years after Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud revisits how art continues to create spaces of relation and forms of shared life.

Nicolas Bourriaud is a curator, theorist, institution director, art historian, and writer. He has authored numerous publications, including Postproduction, Altermodern, and the highly acclaimed Relational Aesthetics.

He founded and co-directed the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (1999–2006), was the founding advisor for Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev (2003–2007), professor at the IUAV in Venice (2006–2007), and Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London (2007/2010). He was director of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (2011-2015). Between 2015 and 2021, he founded and directed MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain. In 2022, he funded Radicants, a curatorial cooperative producing exhibitions worldwide.

As an independent curator, he was part of the curatorial team of Aperto 1993 at the Venice Biennial and organized many international exhibitions including Traffic (Capc Bordeaux, 1996), Estratos (Murcia, Spain, 2008), Altermodern (Tate Britain, 2009), Wirikuta/Mexican time slip (Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2016), and, more recently, Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime (Venice, 2022). He has also curated several biennials including Lyon (2005), Moscou (2005 and 2007 with Rosa Martinez, Daniel Birnbaum, Joseph Backstein, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Iara Boubnova), Athens (2011), Taipei (2014), Kaunas, Lithuania (2015), Istanbul (2019), and Gwangju (2024).

As a theoretician, he has published Relational Aesthetics (1998), which has been translated in more than 15 languages, Postproduction (2002), Radicant. Towards an aesthetics of globalization (2009), The Exform (2015), Inclusions. Aesthetics of the capitalocene (2020) and Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime (2022).

Currently on view at Rome’s MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts until 1 March 2026, and thirty years after formulating Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud revisits the places and questions that gave rise to it in the exhibition he curated, 1+1. The Relational Years. From this perspective, Bourriaud proposes a vision of art as an ecosystemic practice, capable of renewing the bond between matter, form, and community.