IN CONVERSATION
with Michelle Cotton
22 June 2015

 

Series of conversations with curators and guests in and around of Cologne about currents projects and questions towards contemporary art

Q: Michelle, since March 2015 you are appointed as the new director of the Bonner Kunstverein; your exhibition programme will start this autumn. What is your curatorial agenda?
A: I have been working as curator since 2001 and most recently developed a programme for Firstsite, a new centre for contemporary art that opened in Colchester, in 2011. Previous to this, I was at Cubitt where I curated solo exhibitions by artists including Michel Auder, Paul Sietsema and Christodoulos Panayiotou and developed an exhibition about the Design Research Unit which toured to six other galleries including Tate St Ives. (...) Recently I have been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence and more specifically the impact of this area in scientific research on philosophy, literature, film and art. For almost 60 years artists, writers, philosophers and scientists have been speculating about technologies which are now being realized and even becoming widespread. If artificial intelligence has arrived and machines can think, can we perceive a corresponding shift within current artistic production?

Michelle Cotton, UK, is an art historian and director of the Bonner Kunstverein. From 2010-2015 she worked as senior curator at Firstsite, Colchester. In 2009 she curated the exhibition programme at Cubitt, London, and realized a retrospective of the experimental film maker Mary Ellen Bute.

Funding and Support
Cultural Office of the City of Cologne

Images
Michelle Cotton