Jens Hoffmann Mesèn (born 1974 in San José, Costa Rica) is a writer and exhibition maker. He has organzied exhibitions since 1997 and is currently the Director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he also directs the Capp Street Project artist-in-residence program.
Emerging, unusually, from a training in theater 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 catalog 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 highly unique practice and personalized exhibition history reflective of a creative development not dissimilar to that of an artist.
From 2003 to 2007, Hoffmann was the Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.[1] He has curated over 30 exhibitions internationally since the late 1990s. Most recently he was co-curator of the 2nd San Juan Triennial, Puerto Rico, 2009, and was the curator, with Adriano Pedrosa, of the 12th International Istanbul Biennial in 2011. Since 2008 he has been working as a curator for the CIAC Foundation, Mexico City, for which he organized the exhibition Blockbuster: Cinema for Exhibitions which opened in 2011 and is touring till 2013. In 2006 Hoffmann began working with the Kadist Art Foundation based in Paris and San Francisco, for which he has been putting together the 101 Collection, featuring artworks from the West Coast of the United States, as well as El Sur, a collection of artworks by young and emerging Latin American artist.
With Harrell Fletcher, Hoffmann developed the People's Biennial. The first edition was presented in 2010 and 2011 at five US museums, organized by Independent Curators International in New York. Since 2011 Fletcher and Hoffmann are operating the People's Gallery, a gallery space in the Mission District of San Francisco. In 2009 he founded The Exhibitionist: A Journal for Exhibition Making and is editor-at-large of Mousse magazine since 2011.
He is assistant professor at the Curatorial Practice Program of the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and a guest professor at the Nova Academia di Bella Arti in Milan.
He has written more than 150 articles on art and curatorial practice for art magazines and museum publications. His most recent books include The Next Documenta Should be Curated by An Artist (ed.) (Revolver 2004, Frankfurt), Perform, co-authored with Joan Jonas, (Thames & Hudson 2005, London). He is currently authoring SHOW TIME, a history of exhibitions from 1990 to the present, (Thames & Hudson 2012, London) and is editing The Artist's Studio for the series Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery, 2012, Cambridge and London).
Hoffmann was trained as a theater director and studied Stage Directing, Dramaturgy and Cultural Sociology at the Ernst Busch School for Performing Arts in Berlin. He holds an MA in Theater from DasArts – School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance Studies at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Amsterdam.