Once there was a nation that went to war, but after they conquered a continent their own country was destroyed by atom bombs... then the victors imposed democracy on the vanquished. For a group of apprentice architects, artists, and designers, led by a visionary, the dire situation of their country was not an obstacle but an inspiration to plan and think... although they were very different characters, the architects worked closely together to realize their dreams, staunchly supported by a super-creative bureaucracy and an activist state... after 15 years of incubation, they surprised the world with a new architecture--Metabolism--that proposed a radical makeover of the entire land... Then newspapers, magazines, and TV turned the architects into heroes: thinkers and doers, thoroughly modern men... Through sheer hard work, discipline, and the integration of all forms of creativity, their country, Japan, became a shining example... when the oil crisis initiated the end of the West, the architects of Japan spread out over the world to define the contours of a post-Western aesthetic.... --Rem Koolhaas / Hans Ulrich Obrist

Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism--the first non-Western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan's postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images--master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions--telling the 20th-century history of Japan through its architecture.

From the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s, a devastated Japan after the war, and the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo '70 in Osaka, and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s: The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.
Oral history by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist Extensive interviews with Arata Isozaki, Toshiko Kato, Kiyonori Kikutake, Noboru Kawazoe, Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kenji Ekuan, Atsushi Shimokobe, and Takako and Noritaka Tange Hundreds of never-before-seen images, architectural models, and magazine excerpts Layout by award-winning Dutch designer Irma Boom
Further reading

The world's most influential contemporary-art curator explores the history and practice of his craft

Hans Ulrich Obrist curated his first exhibit in his kitchen when he was twenty-three years old. Since then he has staged more than 250 shows internationally, many of them among the most influential exhibits of our age.

Ways of Curating is a compendium of the insights Obrist has gained from his years of extraordinary work in the art world. It skips between centuries and continents, flitting from meetings with the artists who have inspired him (including Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, and Gilbert and George) to biographies of influential figures such as Diaghilev and Walter Hopps. It describes some of the greatest exhibitions in history, as well as some of the greatest exhibitions never realized. It traces the evolution of collections from Athanasius Kircher's seventeenth-century Wunderkammer to modern museums, and points the way for projects yet to come.

Obrist has rescued the word curate from wine stores and playlists to remind us of the power inherent in looking at art--and at the world--in a new way.

Collected interviews with the artist known for his monumental and site-specific environmental installation, held during his final years of life

This volume gathers a series of conversations between Christo (1935-2020) and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, occurring between December 2012 and May 2020. They track the progress of The London Mastaba (2016-18), Christo's first major public outdoor work in the UK, which coincided with an exhibition at Serpentine Galleries outlining Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 60-year history of working with oil barrels. Illustrated with images of finished works, drawings and documentary photographs from throughout Christo and Jeanne-Claude's long and successful career, this hardback reader features previously unpublished material; the final conversation in the book was Christo's last ever interview, recorded shortly before his death.
Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968) is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. He is the creator of The Interview Project, in which he holds lengthy and revealing conversations with artists.

Roberto Matta, Cecilia Vicuña, Alfredo Jaar, Paz Errázuriz and others offer insight into Chilean art and politics

This volume looks closely at the Chilean experimental art scene, in which practitioners have mastered avant-garde strategies and encouraged cultural dissidence. Over the past five years Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed three generations of Chilean artists, performers and writers, many of whom worked despite the horrific violence and censorship of the Pinochet dictatorship and now navigate through the hazy context that surrounds the post-dictatorial nation in the 21st century. This unique constellation of practices has become a model for a particular mode of postmodernism based on research and experimentation. The stunning archival images and extensive interviews organized chronologically with Roberto Matta, Juan Pablo Langlois, Catalina Parra, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Carmen Beuchat, Eugenio Dittborn, Paz Errázuriz, Gonzalo Díaz, Cecilia Vicuña, Diamela Eltit, Raúl Zurita, Alfredo Jaar and Seba Calfuqueo offer a deeply personal insight into Chile's evolving culture.

Poetry on a Post-it: thoughts, dreams, jokes, quotations, questions and puns by some of the world's foremost artists, writers, designers, musicians and actors, from Yoko Ono and Jane Fonda to Jonas Mekas and Grimes

In Remember to Dream!, celebrated curator Hans Ulrich Obrist collects an abundance of thoughts for the day, dreams, drawings, musings, jokes, quotations, questions, answers, poems and puns from some of the world's greatest contemporary artists, musicians and more, handwritten on Post-it notes (and other scraps).

From the reassuringly philosophical to the inspiringly straightforward, the ingeniously funny to the tenderly posthumous, Remember to Dream! (titled after a note by Carrie Mae Weems) paints a picture of the art world direct from many of the most celebrated creative figures of the 21st century. These include BTS, Marina Abramovic, Tracey Emin, FKA twigs, Gilbert & George, Grimes, Zaha Hadid, Pharrell Williams, Zadie Smith, David Lynch, Jonas Mekas, Frank Ocean, Yoko Ono, Eileen Myles, Arca and Vivienne Westwood.

The book features a preface by Hans Ulrich Obrist and is designed by award-winning book designer Irma Boom.

A history of the last 50 years of curating told through Hans Ulrich Obrist's interviews with legendary curators Anne D'Harnoncourt, Werner Hoffman, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hulten, and Harald Szeemann

Part of JRPRinger's innovative Documents series, published with Les Presses du R�el and dedicated to critical writings, this publication comprises a unique collection of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist mapping the development of the curatorial field--from early independent curators in the 1960s and 70s and the experimental institutional programs developed in Europe and the U.S. through the inception of Documenta and the various biennales and fairs--with pioneering curators Anne D'Harnoncourt, Werner Hoffman, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hulten and Harald Szeemann. Speaking of Szeemann on the occasion of this legendary curator's death in 2005, critic Aaron Schuster summed up, the image we have of the curator today: the curator-as-artist, a roaming, freelance designer of exhibitions, or in his own witty formulation, a 'spiritual guest worker'... If artists since Marcel Duchamp have affirmed selection and arrangement as legitimate artistic strategies, was it not simply a matter of time before curatorial practice--itself defined by selection and arrangement--would come to be seen as an art that operates on the field of art itself?

Hans Ulrich Obrist leads readers into the world of path-breaking Syrian artist Simone Fattal in this intensely personal volume.

For over five decades, Simone Fattal (b. 1942, Damascus) has eschewed singular form or subject in her wide-ranging artistic practice. In this deeply personal biography, Fattal's close friend and confidante Hans Ulrich Obrist journeys with the artist across physical borders and through seats of imagination. Together they discuss the artist's remarkable early life in Syria, her coming-of-age in Lebanon, as well as her transcultural life in France. Wartime memory and exile in California, sow the seed for discussions regarding archaeology, history, and mythology.

Beginning her artistic life as a painter in 1969, Fattal initially created sensuous abstract works that diverged from the predominantly figurative paintings commonly exhibited in Lebanon at the time. In 1980, after a decade spent in Lebanon, Fattal fled the ongoing civil war, departing from painting, eventually settling in Sausalito, California, where she founded the revolutionary publishing house, Post-Apollo Press.

In 1988, after studying sculpture in San Francisco, Fattal was consumed by another wave of creativity that led her to pursue the creation of ambitious ceramic sculpture--a medium in which she continues to work in to this day from her studio in Paris.

Prose and interviews between Fattal and Obrist are annotated and introduced by Dr. Omar Kholeif, whose essay helps situate Fattal's multiple creative journeys. An afterword by author, curator, and filmmaker Rasha Salti entitled Warrior Women Fall From a Low Height pulses, both in its lyricism and its expressive desire to solder and suture histories, once fractious, back together.

Published in collaboration with artPost21

A definitive and timely monograph celebrating the work of ground-breaking conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans

Cerith Wyn Evans is one of today's most respected and acclaimed sculptors. Born in Wales and educated through his first language of Welsgh, his work reflects his fascination with literature, film, music, and philosophy. Evans is an artist interested in language and how this can be perceived in spatial terms.

Originally an experimental filmmaker, in the 1990s Evans started creating sculptures and installations defined by poetic conceptualism and elegant aesthetic forms. Often made of neon light, his pieces subtly disrupt existing systems of communication, either through the subversion and alteration of given spatial forms or by adopting a communal rather than a singular, authoritarian voice.

In 2003 Evans represented Wales at the country's inaugural pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. This book, the first comprehensive study dedicated to his work, includes contributions by luminaries such as the former Guggenheim Chief, Nancy Spector and the 2011 Venice Biennale director, Daniel Birnbaum, together with a previously unpublished text by Evans himself.

Eduardo Terrazas hat sein gesamtes künstlerisches Schaffen der Suche nach der Struktur des Universums gewidmet. Sein visuelles Nachdenken bedient sich geometrischer Grundformen sowie einer gestalterischen Technik, die von den Fadenbildern der indigenen mexikanischen Ethnie der Huicholen entlehnt ist. Seine farbenprächtige, spielerische Serie Possibilities of a Structure, zu der auch die Unterserie Cosmos zählt, beschäftigt ihn seit 1974 und umfasst bis heute 650 Werke.

Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with the foremost musicians and composers of the mid- to late 20th-century, from Yoko Ono to Brian Eno

Following the success of Hans Ulrich Obrist's A Brief History of Curating, this publication gathers the influential curator's interviews with some of the foremost musicians and composers of the 1950s-1990s. It brings together leading avant-garde composers of the early postwar period such as Elliot Carter, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen; pioneers of electroacoustic music such as François Bayle, Pauline Oliveros, Iannis Xenakis and Peter Zinovieff; minimalist and Fluxus-inspired artist-musicians such as Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Phil Niblock, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich and Terry Riley; and figures that have moved between classical/experimental realms and more pop terrain, such as Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Howie B., Arto Lindsay and Caetano Veloso. Obrist's interviews map the evolution of the new music in Europe and America across all of its genres, from musique concrète to the recent hybridizations between pop and avant-garde, as techniques from both realms cross-pollinate. A Brief History of New Music is an ideal introduction to the experimental and new classical music of the past half-century.

Hans Ulrich Obrist has been a staunch supporter of the Los Angeles maestro of Conceptualism John Baldessari from early on in his career. For these conversations, the artist and curator were joined by, among others, the Uruguayan artist and author Alejandro Cesarco, a friend and previous public interlocutor of Baldessari's. Baldessari himself offers readers insight into the motives and semiotics of his multimedia work and his life as an artist, always expressing himself with precision and with wit. A recurrent topic throughout these discussions is the interaction of text and image (on which so much of Baldessari's work leans), and issues such as the museum as institution, idea archives and unrealized projects, and on his career, exhibitions and retrospectives of the past few years.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Hans Ulrich Obrist but were afraid to ask has been asked by the sixteen practitioners in this book. Spanning the beginning of his career as a young curator in his Zurich kitchen to his time most recently as the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs, and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the book is a production of reality conversations. It undertakes the impossible: pinning down this peripatetic curator, attempting to map his psychogeography so that silences may be transcribed. In a sense, it organizes a protest against forgetting and affirms the sagacity of an artist who told this dontstop curator don't go when he contemplated leaving the art world for other fields--to go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge--in lieu of bringing other fields into the (then) hermetic art world.

Contributors
Jean-Max Colard, Robert Fleck, Jefferson Hack, Nav Haq, Noah Horowitz, Sophia Krzys Acord, Brendan McGetrick, Markus Miessen, Ingo Niermann, Paul O'Neill, Philippe Parreno & Alex Poots, Juri Steiner, Gavin Wade, Enrique Walker

Hans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting ongoing conversations with the world's greatest living artists since he began in Switzerland, aged 19, with Fischli and Weiss. Here he chooses 19 of the greatest figures and presents their conversations, offering the reader intimacy with the artists and insight into their creative processes. Inspired by the great Vasari, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects explores the meaning of art and artists today, their varying approaches to creating, and a sense of how their thinking evolves over time. Including David Hockney, Gilbert and George, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Rem Koolhaas, and Oscar Niemeyer, this is a wonderful and unique book for those interested in modern art.

The Air Is Blue was an exhibition orchestrated in Luis Barrag n's house and studio by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Pedro Reyes, featuring Francis Alÿs, Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Rem Koolhaas, Lygia Pape, Anri Sala, Ettore Sottsass, Rikrit Tiravanija and Niele Toroni, among others; this volume is a reprint of the 2006 catalog for that exhibition.

Marathon Marathon documents a 2010 iteration of Hans Ulrich Obrist's series of Marathon events, held at the Acropolis Museum in Athens and co-curated by Nadja Argyropoulou. Marking the 2,500th anniversary of the battle of Marathon, international discussants spent 12 hours addressing questions of identity, antiquity, democracy and the politics of representation.

Hans Ulrich Obrist often quotes the great art historian Erwin Panofsky, who once famously said that the future is built from fragments of the past. How these fragments accumulate is often a matter of historical inquiry as well as shared personal experiences. Here, 12 artists and an architect--Danai Anesiadou, James Bridle, Elizabeth Diller, Apostolos Georgiou, Isaac Julien, Jeff Koons, Ranjana Leyendecker, Charles Ray, Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Raqs Media Collective), Christiana Soulou, Hito Steyerl and Adrián Villar Rojas--engage in conversation with Obrist, challenging history's defining notions and offering diverse accounts of how the present is imagined in relation to the past. One of the conversations takes the form of a photographic essay by Ari Marcopoulos examining Athens, the ancient city and its contemporary life. The Athens Dialogues reveals how antiquity is a toolbox for shaping not only artistic and research practices, but present-day realities and the futures to come.

The Richter Interviews collects conversations between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gerhard Richter conducted over the course of more than two decades of discussion and collaboration. Subjects discussed range from Richter's place within art history to artists' books, architecture, religion, unrealized projects and his advice for young artists. This collection also includes a previously unpublished interview focused on Richter's much-lauded window for Cologne Cathedral.
Obrist's vast knowledge and interrogating mind, coupled with his longstanding friendship with Richter, make him a unique interlocutor for the artist, whose work spans more than 60 years and ranges from painting to photography, glass to printmaking, watercolors to books.
Illustrations of artworks discussed by Richter accompany the texts for visual reference--making this an indispensable guide to the thinking and creative processes of one of the world's most admired artists.
Born in Dresden, East Germany, in 1932, Gerhard Richter migrated to West Germany in 1961, settling in Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, and where he held his first solo exhibition in 1963. Over the course of that decade, Richter helped to liberate painting from the legacy of socialist realism (in Eastern Germany) and abstract expressionism (in Western Germany and throughout Europe). He has exhibited internationally for the last five decades, with retrospectives in New York, Paris and Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne.
Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968) is a world-renowned curator and the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Alongside his curatorial practice, Obrist has written extensively on and around contemporary art, with a particular interest in the interview format. Among his recent publications are Conversations in Colombia (2016) and The Czech Files (2015).

The result of conversations between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Christian Boltanski, Take Me (I'm Yours) rewrites the rulebook for experiencing a work of art. Published on the occasion of the exhibition's latest iteration in Milan, this fully illustrated catalog features the works of over thirty artists installed in the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca.

On September 29, 2018, before a live audience at Navy Pier in Chicago, international curator Hans Ulrich Obrist conducted his first US Marathon interview session as part of Art Design Chicago, a yearlong celebration of Chicago's art and design legacy initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Obrist, who has undertaken a life-long project of interviewing cultural figures, spoke with more than twenty of Chicago's most innovative and influential artists, designers, architects, writers, and other creatives. In their interviews, this diverse group of creatives provided insights into their artistic processes, influences, and ideas about and hopes for their shared city of Chicago. Among the participants were social-practice artist/developer Theaster Gates, architect Jeanne Gang, writer Eve Ewing, Hairy Who artists Art Green and Suellen Rocca, performance/installation artist Shani Crowe, and the city's cultural historian Tim Samuelson. Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon serves as documentation for this event, including edited transcripts of the interviews, biographies of the participants, photos of the event, and images of the artists' work.

In volume 16 of The Conversation Series, Hans Ulrich Obrist presents an in-depth exchange with the venerable German-born artist and activist Gustav Metzger, which illuminates the artist's fascinating life and 60-year career. In 1959, Metzger penned a manifesto of Auto-destructive art, which states in part, Auto-destructive paintings, sculptures and constructions have a lifetime varying from a few moments to 20 years. When the disintegrative process is complete, the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped. In this volume, Metzger talks to Obrist about his past and present association with Auto-destructive art, how he has come to fuse his art practice with his political commitment to human rights and ecology, how he escaped the Holocaust at the age of 13 and the many projects he has yet to realize.