The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Philippe Pirotte was a co-artistic director of the Busan Biennale 2024 and is currently a professor of art history and curatorial studies at the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Prior to this, he served on the Documenta Commission (2019-2022), which selected ruangrupa as the artistic directors of documenta fifteen (2022). Pirotte held the position of rector of the Städelschule and director of Kunsthalle Portikus between 2014–2020. During this period, he was the artistic director of La Biennale de Montréal (2016) and was a member of the curatorial team of the Karkarta Biennale (2017). He curated the survey exhibition of performance artist Melati Suryodarmo at Bonnnefanten Museum Maastricht, and the group show, Arus Balik. From Below the Wind to Above the Wind and Back Again for the Center for Contemporary Art Singapore (2019). As a regular lecturer, he recently presented at the international forum "Tense Switching: Non-Aligned Movement, Third Worldism and Asian Art" (Asia Culture Centre in Gwangju - South-Korea, December 2018); the symposium "Postcolonial Perspectives from the South" (Goethe Institute Jakarta, January 2019); and the conference "Considering Monoculture" (organized by l’Internationale, MuHKA and Vanabbemuseum, February 2020). Pirotte co-founded the Antwerp contemporary art center, objectif (1999), and from 2005 to 2011, he served as the director of the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. From 2004 to 2013, he was a senior advisor at the Rijksakademie for Visual Arts in Amsterdam. Pirotte has authored essays and contributions to catalogues on modern and contemporary art. As well, he has served as the editor of numerous volumes, including An Anthology of Published & Unpublished Writings by Hassan Khan (2019).

Pirotte will talk about the experience of curating the Busan Biennale in South Korea (busanbiennale2024.com/en) and about an exhibition, Spectres of Bandung, that he is preparing for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, after it was cancelled at Gropius Bau Berlin in 2023. It is based on research he started in 2019 and an online conference he organized two years later, "The Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung" (www.colorcurtain.org). Both exhibitions, Busan and Spectres, are transformative for his work over the last few years, he says. He adds that this work is related to earlier activities, such as the nomination of ruangrupa as artistic directors for documenta fifteen. 

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