This lecture is presented as part of AGENCY: A curatorial intensive in three questions—How do I learn? How do I act? How do I imagine? presented by Artspace Aotearoa and Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery. Read more about the full symposium programme.

How do I act: Modus Operandi

In her talk, Clémentine Deliss will present the Metabolic Museum-University, a transversal curatorial model for remediating contentious or forgotten collections. To illustrate her modus operandi, she will introduce her forthcoming exhibition the Département des Pièges (Department of Traps) that opens in November 2026 at the new museum in Brussels, Kanal-Centre Pompidou. The title of the exhibition pays tribute to the Département des Aigles, the fictional museum of modern art by Marcel Broodthaers, the leading Belgian Surrealist and Conceptual artist of the 1960s. Deliss’ exhibition is designed as a study space for visual thinking, an environment that merges the museum with the university. At the centre of the room is a large table in the shape of a lung surrounded by chairs. Artefacts from ten Brussels’ museums are placed in proximity to artists’ prototypes and sculptures by Guillaume Bijl, Kasper Bosmans, Aline Bouvy, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Otobong Nkanga, and more. Works by Belgian and international artists spanning the 17th to the 21st centuries line the wall and include Dutch still life painter Jan Weenix and Luke Willis Thompson. The common thread to all exhibits is the concept of the trap and the lure. The exhibition asks us to imagine new relationships between collections that suspend colonial divisions and speak about today’s worlds.

Workshop participants already have a reserved place at this lecture and are not required to RSVP.

AGENCY: A curatorial intensive in three questions—How do I learn? How do I act? How do I imagine? is presented by Artspace Aotearoa and Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery and supported by Chartwell Trust, Goethe Institut, National Services Te Paerangi, and Toi o Aotearoa Creative New Zealand Te Manu Ka Tau International Delegates Programme.

Clémentine Deliss works across the borders of contemporary art, curatorial practice, and publishing. She lives in Berlin and has joint German and British nationality. She studied art practice in Vienna, and later social anthropology in Vienna, Paris, and London, and received her Ph.D. from the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. As an artist-curator, her practice is characterized by an early concern for international artist-led dialogues, team constellations in curating, and new approaches to museology. Deliss is currently Curator at Large at KANAL-Centre Pompidou. Since 2024, she has been KANAL-Guest Professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, and since 2021, Global Humanities Professor in History of Art, at the University of Cambridge. Between 2010–2015, she was Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt/Main, where she instituted a new trans-disciplinary lab to remediate collections within a post-ethnological paradigm, working with a wide range of artists, lawyers, and writers. Her publications include The Metabolic Museum (2020) published by Hatje Cantz which was translated into Russian in 2021 (Garage Museum), and into Spanish in 2023 (Caniche Editorial, Madrid); and, Skin in the Game: Conversations on Risk and Contention published in 2023 by Hatje Cantz/ KW Institute for Contemporary Art to accompany the exhibition at KW, Berlin. Since 1996, she has produced the independent artists’ and writer’s organ Metronome, and twice officially invited to documenta, first in 1997 (dx) and then in 2007 (d12).