Brenda Guesnet
Curator and Deputy Director, Museum of Contemporary Art in Eupen / IKOB (BE)
Brenda Guesnet is the Curator and Deputy Director at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Eupen, Belgium (IKOB). Previously, she worked in the Artist Liaison department at White Cube, London (2017 - 2020) and as Curatorial Assistant at Tenderpixel Gallery (2016 - 17), after completing an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London (2015 - 17). She also regularly organises independent curatorial projects as part of the collective ANGL, which she co-founded in 2016.---
[...] How did you get into curating?
I have just got back from Mexico. I also went there ten years ago when I had just finished high school, and back then I went by myself, which is kind of crazy. I remember looking and wandering about these raw, ancient, manifestations of culture in architecture. On that trip, I also got out to art museums and enjoyed them in a really concentrated, free, way, which is typical of a child maybe, but also of becoming an adult. I didn't really grow up seeing contemporary art, there was really nothing there where I grew up, and it was not something that I was familiar with. But I had a cousin who was a curator. And so I was sort of starting to understand it although not fully. I became focused on this very quickly and made a lot of choices that sort of helped me to get there step by step. And I think that the more I understood about what it actually means to be a curator, the more I was fascinated with people who make art. I started being really interested in what motivates them, starting from a position of curiosity, and the weird and different things they make. From there I invented ways to work with them, and grew into my curatorial awareness.
In my current role as Deputy Director at IKOB museum I am lucky to spend time talking to artists, researching, and writing texts, but most of the time, I'm doing other things. some other stuff. This week for instance, I'm doing activities with a group of kids all day; other times, I might have to go to the forest to find some trees for an artist to use in an installation. Maybe a curator that doesn't do those things is more like an archetype of it, which feels quite alien to my lived experience.
Do you have a theme or a focus, as a curator?
It's something that I struggle with in a way because I always felt like I should have one but I also never liked to define things too much. Having a thematic focus as a curator for me always felt tied up with self representation, like a CV, giving people the perfect story with no outliers or gaps or detours. But is there a need for such a linear story?
I have a feeling that this apprehension maybe comes from the context of my MFA in Curating, where it sometimes felt like there was a culture of gatekeeping, people who wanted to decide who is ready or allowed to put an idea into action. I never really understood what the point of this was, we were all students just wanting and needing to try things out, and also, it's art - there's no rules. You have to experiment and like that you'll become conscious of what works and what doesn't, it's the only way to learn - and also something that continues, no matter how institutionalised or established you become.
Now that I'm more confident and experienced, I don't think I need a focus. There are things that I find more interesting than others. But this can be quite conceptual and intuitive. For me it's more the choices I make about who to work with, what are the conditions I can provide, what makes sense in a certain space and time.
Curatorially speaking I think alot about playfulness and play in general, trying to not be so serious about everything all the time. Even just thinking of life in general as a game that you're playing, keeping a lightness to everything you do.
What about the institution you're based in, how is your curatorial work impacting it or how is it being impacted by the institution? Any circumstances to talk about around the idea of tokenisation?
The context I'm working in currently, is very much peripheral, located in a small town. I spend a lot of time thinking about the audience. When I bring an artist I love and have a long standing relationship with, I always wonder how people will respond to it, are they going to come, is it going to work? What do people like? How will they react? Most of the time, if you're working in a more urban context, you're usually very spoiled in terms of your audience. They'll easily engage with things that are a bit more experimental and that are new to them. I think I struggled to shift my thinking at first, to develop programming that people will engage with in this context and put that above your own preferences or interests. And in this environment it takes more time, more effort, more staff, more resources to really reach out to people and secure an audience - we have a very small team and often that's not possible. What does this mean for the way we work with artists and think about our programming?
Another aspect I reflect upon in relation to this is our obligation, in terms of funding, to work with local artists, which makes total sense but is also a challenge when you are operating in such a small art scene with no art school. Working with local artists is what contributes to a strong community around our institution and a heightened interest from the regional audience, and at the same time I think our role is also to expose people to unfamiliar, cutting-edge, radical work that they wouldn't be able to see anywhere else nearby. It's not always easy to get the balance right.
I recently worked on an exhibition that revolves around an award, called the Feminist Art Prize. The prize happens every three years and I developed this edition for our programme. A jury selects a group of artists who are part of the exhibition, but then only some of them win a prize, which is of course quite common with these kind of competitions. I ended up being on a really tight schedule and there wasn't time to reflect upon the structure of the prize. I basically followed the loose protocol for past editions of the prize, which I felt at times to be lacking and partially contradicting the ethos of the prize itself. Or maybe the idea of a prize contradicts my understanding of feminism? In retrospect, I would have liked to go about things differently but felt like I didn't have enough time or resources to do this in a considered way. I often get so caught up in production and making things happen, that I neglect to pause and think about the wider context.
Another issue we need to work on is fees. In the Belgian context there's no clear guidelines on how to pay artists, while in some countries they are very defined. As an institution we don't have a defined policy on this, and I have been negotiating artist fees individually, following from an initial conversation and an evaluation of the labour involved. While this does work for us, it also leads to inconsistencies.
I think transparency is key, and our goal is to create a fee structure that we can publish on our website for everyone to see.
There are also things we can offer as an institution that don't involve money, like flexible working conditions and support. Creating the right conditions for the work to happen is crucial, and we often get proposals for shows that involve things we didn't even know we could offer, but through working together we can achieve it and ideally provide a meaningful, joyful, unique opportunity for an artist.