Karen Archey

Karen Archey

Head of Curatorial Department, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany

Towards a Curatorial Pleasure

Discourse on institutional curatorial practice is oftentimes framed around ethics. The daily practice of museum curating is given form by Microsoft Office Suite, marketing meetings, production disasters, and fundraising brainstorms. Where exactly, one may ask, does pleasure come into this constellation?

Archey reflects on the experience of curating an exhibition for a commercial gallery for the first time in more than a decade. With few rules or expectations, Archey was invited to organize a small group presentation for Vienna’s Croy Nielsen on the occasion of Curated By festival. The resulting was an intuitively organized intergenerational exhibition of works by the curator’s longtime artist-friends and historical heroes. The exhibition had no analytical curatorial text, but rather offered a poem as leitmotif. What felt like breaking the rules and a potential reputational risk received an overwhelmingly positive reception, inciting intensive debates as well as major reviews in publications such as ArtReview and Monopol. But the clearest marker of success was the renewed sense of pleasure in the collaboration between artists and curator – in the practice of making exhibitions together.

Since this experience in September 2025, Archey has sought to test this renewed sense of pleasure within her work as Deputy Director at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Archey will speak about the tension between institutional ethics and pleasure, and whether it is possible to unite these within a total curatorial practice.

Biography:

Karen Archey is Head of the Curatorial Department of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf. From 2017 until 2025, she was Curator of Contemporary Art at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where she cared for the contemporary art and time-based media collections, as well as organizing major exhibitions of artists Hito Steyerl, Rineke Dijkstra, Metahaven, and Marina Abramović. For the Stedelijk, she commissioned performance works by Nora Turato, Jennifer Tee, Ann Hirsch, Alicia Frankovich, and CFGNY, among others.

Archey is a leading voice worldwide on the subject of modern and contemporary art and museum practice. A frequent public speaker, she has recently given lectures at MMCA, Seoul, South Korea; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Swiss Institute, New York; and MUDAM, Luxembourg, among other institutions. Formerly based in Berlin and New York, she earlier worked as an independent curator, editor, and art critic, writing for publications such as Artforum and Frieze. In 2014, she organized with Robin Peckham the landmark exhibition Art Post-Internet at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. In 2015, she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form writing. Her essay-length book After Institutions (Floating Opera Press, 2022) examines museums as a rapidly changing public space subject to radical political and economic shifts.