Philippe Pirotte

Busan Biennale 2024
Co-artistic director
Städelschule
Professor

Philippe Pirotte, co-artistic director of Busan Biennale 2024, is an art history professor at the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and an adjunct senior curator at the Museum and Pacific Film Archive of the University of California, Berkeley.  Prior to this, he served on the Documenta Commission (2019-2022), which selected ruangrupa as the artistic direction of documenta fifteen (2022). 

Pirotte held the position of rector of the Städelschule and director of Kunsthalle Portikus between 2014–2020. He also co-founded the Antwerp contemporary art center objectif (1999), and from 2005-2011 he took on the directorship of Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. From 2004 to 2013, Philippe Pirotte was Senior Advisor at the Rijksakademie for Visual Arts in Amsterdam.

Recently he curated the survey exhibition of performance artist Melati Suryodarmo at Bonnnefanten Museum Maastricht, and the group show Arus Balik. From Below the Wind to Above the Wind and Back Again for the Center for Contemporary Art Singapore (2019). He was member of the curatorial team of the Jakarta Biennale in 2017, and was artistic director of the 2016 edition of La Biennale de Montréal, Canada.

Pirotte is editor of several books and authored essays and contributions to catalogues on modern and contemporary art. Most recently he edited an anthology of writings by artist Hassan Khan. As a regular lecturer he recently presented a.o. at: the international forum Tense Switching: Non-Aligned Movement, Third Worldism and Asian Art (Asia Culture Centre in Gwangju - South-Korea, December 2018); the symposium Postcolonial Perspectives from the South (Goethe Institute Jakarta – Indonesia, January 2019); and the conference Considering Monoculture (organized by l’Internationale, MuHKA and Vanabbemuseum, February 2020). 

Philippe Pirotte visited Vienna on a research trip in September 2023 in his function as co-artistic director of the Busan Biennale 2024.

Philippe Pirotte. Photo: Diana Pfammatter