Never There Yet (Possibility and the Limits of Institutional Curating)

Twenty-five years inside European art institutions to ask what lies beyond their limits.

Where does possibility lie in curating today? Charles Esche has spent twenty-five years inside European art institutions asking that question—as a museum director and curator of biennials, and now from outside institutional forms altogether.

In Never There Yet, Esche traces the changing locations of curatorial possibility across a quarter century of cultural and political transformation in Europe. Beginning with three works of art and a tree, he follows the arc from a suspended pre-2008 moment through the polarized present to the limits of what institutional curating can now sustain. Along the way, he revisits exhibitions that defined his directorship of the Van Abbemuseum—Be(com)ing Dutch, Forms of Resistance, Museum of Arte Útil, Soils—alongside biennials in Istanbul, Ramallah, and São Paulo, and the formation of the museum confederation L’Internationale.

What emerges is both a diagnosis and a proposition. The reform imaginary that shaped European art institutions through the 2010s has reached its limits, eroded by austerity, market capture, the rise of an oligarch collector class, and the institution’s own incapacity to absorb what its publics now ask of it. But possibility has not disappeared. It has moved—to instituent organizations working outside the institutional form, to infrastructural curatorial practices working from within it, to new sites where the conditions for the not-yet-possible are being rebuilt. Esche writes from Amsterdam and from the Three Ashes Foundation, a land-based project outside Bucharest where he is working out with others what an art institute of the commons might look like.