Jens Hoffmann
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Jens Hoffmann (born 1972 in San José, Costa Rica) is one of the most active and most influential exhibition makers working in the field of contemporary art today. He has worked as a curator since 1997 and is currently the Director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. From 2003 to 2007 he was the Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He has curated over 30 exhibitions internationally since the late 1990s many of which have altered the understanding of the practise of curating.
Emerging, unusually, from a training in theatre rather than art history or curatorial studies, Hoffmann has used his directorial knowledge in particular to articulate his unique approach to curating. Of key importance for all of his exhibitions is the actual staging of the experience—ranging from the design of the space and installation, the conceptualization of the catalogue and related programming, to the attention paid to the performance of the work itself. The ‘stage-set’ or rather the exhibition space, site, or geographical location is itself an important factor in the development of his ideas which respond to both time and place. Hoffmann takes into account both the larger historical and socio-political context in which an exhibition takes place as well as the relevant curatorial or art historical relationships pertaining to a project. Using the ideas and strategies of artists, in particular conceptual art, and applying this approach to a curatorial idea of the author is a defining characteristic of Hoffmann’s work and results in a personalized exhibition history reflective of a creative development not dissimilar to that of an artist.
Hoffmann was trained as a theater director and studied Stage Directing, Drama Theory and Cultural Sociology at the Ernst Busch School for Performing Arts in Berlin. He holds an MA in Performance Studies from DasArts – School for Advanced Theatre and Dance Studies in Amsterdam.
