Christoforos Marinos: The past fifteen years have witnessed a rush of publications, essays and research programs examining the history of exhibitions and the seminal work of museum directors and curators who have shaped the field of exhibition curation, leaving their personal, ground-breaking mark. I indicatively mention the Exhibition Histories series by Afterall Books, and the books they released on three legendary curators, Harald Szeemann (1933–2005), Willem Sandberg (1897–1984) and Pontus Hultén (1924–2006), as well as the younger, prematurely lost Igor Zabel (1958–2005). [i]

This study focuses on the internationally acclaimed curator Christos Joachimides (1932–2017) and is the first attempt to outline his achievements and gain an appreciation of his legacy and his impact. [ii]  A contemporary of Szeemann, Joachimides belonged to an elite circle of European art curators and historians, who, from the early 1970s and over the 30 years that followed, dominated the international curatorial scene. Many of them, in fact, spearheaded the creation of museums of modern and contemporary art. Joachimides worked as an independent curator — he began his career in the late 1960s — and became synonymous to large scale, ambitious exhibitions, which recorded the most prevalent tendencies in the art of his time, while generating new ones.

From the research you have conducted for the purposes of this research workshop, what conclusions have you drawn about the curator Christos Joachimides? What has captured your interest? Which would you say are the basic features of his practice as a curator? And which of his exhibitions stand out for you? It goes without saying that the point of this study is not to canonise Joachimides, but to make a sober, critical appraisal of his contribution and his action as a curator.


Eva Vaslamatzi: In the introductory text for the catalog of the exhibition titled American Art in the 20th Century, which Christos Joachimides held and co-curated with Norman Rosenthal in 1993, entitled Wrenching America’s Impulse into Art: Notes on Art in the USA, uses a verse from William Carlos Williams’ poem Pastoral: “These things / Astonish me beyond words.”

Among a large number of texts, interviews, images and references which I have been studying in an effort to familiarize myself with a curator whose work I never saw myself, this ostensibly unimportant reference intrigues me. In his work, paying respect to the trivial moments of life the author sanctifies the everyday with the sensitivity of someone who reduces his own participation in order to create a scene for the others. In this particular poem, Williams captures moments that take place outside in the street on a day like any other, turning random figures into protagonists that pass by, and as occasions to think fleetingly on human nature. What makes Joachimides choose this phrase, apart from the poet’s country of origin? In his text, the author is not mentioned again. Walt Whitman and Williams S. Burroughs are mentioned instead, to illustrate his historical reading of American art that he perceives as divided (see “the two faces of the Janus […] the longing for an abstract apotheosis of reality and the urge to dissect and appropriate it.”)

Of Williams' entire poem, Joachimides keeps his last sentence, in which the author confesses the inadequacy of the medium of speech to describe an experience — which he paradoxically expresses with the same medium. Perhaps this phrase refers to the artworks Joachimides saw in the USA during the research he conducted for the exhibition and for which he did not have the theoretical tools to place them in an artistic continuation. Perhaps it refers to a wider complex relationship between speech and image or experience that has to do with the very nature of visual arts. We will never know the reason why he used this reference, but in the context of this study, I wish to translate it as a statement that declares a curatorial approach, perhaps betraying his own relation with language.

Of all the material we have in our hands, what motivates me to read in the first place are his curatorial texts in the exhibition catalogs, searching through his writing to find quotes in the first person. I notice that his curatorial writing is quite detached, his texts small in length compared to the size of the exhibitions, and often describes the works of the participating artists. Emphasis is placed on curatorial practice within the space and on the viewer's experience, which, as he himself declares in an interview in the Greek press on the occasion of his Outlook exhibition, seeks the “emotional”. The curatorial text is a tool that appears secondary, if the experience of the exhibition “convinces” the viewer to become more informed about what he or she first felt, thus avoiding any didactic dimension in curating.

Compared to other exhibitions of the same period (such as Szeemann’s 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form), most of Joachimides’ exhibitions are not connected to a poetic curatorial idea, nor to a theoretical direction. His exhibitions are usually centered on a geographical or historical definition (Berlin, Berlin, German Art in the 20th Century). But what makes Joachimides’ curating special is that some of his exhibitions captured the spirit of the era (Zeitgeist, Outlook, Metropolis). Having begun his career as a journalist, perhaps he maintained, as a curator, an attitude of recording and showcasing, which I perceive as a sort of three-dimensional journalism, through his skill for “capturing” the climate of the times and placing his trust in the artists he chose to support, e.g., through commissioning new works. Just as Williams captures through the work the reality around him and is led to the conclusion that language is not capable of expressing it, so Joachimides tries to record the artistic production of the time, realizing that its power is based on its association with shared experience in space, and not only on language.

The matter of the absence of personal discourse, as well as his talent for identifying and promoting artists who were active contemporaneous to him are points of interest for me in the curator’s practice: not as weaknesses or strengths, but in terms of how the two might be interlinked.  How does a curator position himself/herself (and therefore language) in relation to a contemporary work? What are the possible paths and connections between the exhibition and the accompanying text? In what ways can language approach a work of art? Can the curatorial text be an extra artwork within the exhibition?

Those are a few of the initial questions that come to mind in the context of this study, and in endeavoring to get to know the curator through the library’s archival material, as well as oral accounts by those who met him, worked with him, or saw his exhibitions. More than conclusions or a focus on a particular exhibition, I am interested in bringing facts to the surface and inventing connections between them, which reflect my own meditations upon curating, as a profession and as a process.


Panos Giannikopoulos: I begin from a library, from a selection of books Christos Joachimides bequeathed the Athens School of Fine Arts, and I have a sense of touring a particular scene. I wonder how arbitrary this selection might be, whether this wealth of books, these physical carriers of written and visual content, defines theoretical lines, whether it aims to say or to unlock something, if there is already a direction — on the shelves the entire history of “Western” art, from the material culture of antiquity to modernism and contemporary art. Monographs and catalogues from artists with whom he had worked closely, as well as artists he seems to have followed, collective publications and essays. Books on masks, on Latin American countries and Africa break up the Western European bias, without, however, a corresponding presence of contemporary artists in these geographical locations. It is probably the relationship/beginning of modernism with/from those cultural contexts that forge the connection, as well as Joachimides’ work for the Africa: Art of a Continent exhibition. The continuum of historical rule and innovation that he keeps coming back to in his exhibitions seems to be reflected in his library. German art and the evolution of contemporary art in America dominate in terms of volume, evoking the principal locations of Joachimides’ action. This could never be a dry historical research project, because the curator who is its subject used historical references to create “a panorama that penetrates the complexity” of the era, emphasising the “musicality and the rhythm of the narrative” — the only consistent immersion into his archive would follow that same direction.

I rummage through the books in a mood to find that which will release me from the control of the great curator, the one I think of as directing my moves. The way I walk around the space, the books I choose to bring down from the shelves. The press has created this image of the powerful organiser of exhibitions and thus even the direction is subject to the ghost of the curator/director.

Joachimides, tired of the excessive use of the word already from 1980, did not describe himself as a curator, but as a creator of exhibitions, the orchestrator-creator of scenes that served as the context for the artwork-viewer interaction. As an instigator, then, a word subsequently also used by Hans Ulrich Obrist to define his curatorial practice. Curation is always a sort of control, but it can, at the same time – and without contradiction – be the creation of an open condition.  Words may be important: curator or creator of exhibitions? Director or stage designer of a situation? It is significant, here, in its connection to theatricality, the realm of the spectacle. Joachimides created that condition of involvement with the subject, he constructed journeys within it. The society of the spectacle as a feature of his time could not be absent from his exhibition practice.

Curation as care, preservation and connection with the history of art, despite the ostensible denial of the word by Joachimides, is evident both in his work and in the way he talks about it. As he says himself: “I started to think with the artists from early on. I did not use them as entomology subjects as many art historians do, who are afraid to touch the artists because they think of them as too savage or too strange or whatever. On the contrary, I lived with these artists, and I had the opportunity to observe the way they thought”. Joachimides forged close relationships during the 60s with Baselitz, Lüpertz, Koberling and Hödicke, in the early days of their careers; he experimented and developed his practice with them. Particularly close was his partnership with Joseph Beuys by whom, as he says himself, he was inspired and influenced. That relationship between artist and curator, the ongoing dialogue, the co-creation and constitution of strong ties of friendship is one of the key features I have taken away from the research process.

Curating the curation, a gesture cubed that creates another interesting complexity.  I try to delineate my thoughts and to get away from the idea that the staging of my moves is still under the control of the late curator.

“Outlook: I open the window. Outside, I see the bright light blinding me, I close my eyes, the scenes are inside me. When I open my eyes again, I see before me the images of art that surround me”. That is the phrase that introduces Joachimides’ text for the last major exhibition he held in Athens (Outlook, 2003), in his attempt to trace the “new routes” in contemporary art, connecting them to important artists of the previous generations, and creating a sense of continuity.

I follow the same methodology, closing and opening my eyes. Outlook is the first exhibition I remember visiting, it is the primordial moment of a decision to engage with the field, and so it follows that there is something inherently personal in my examination of its archive. I did not know Joachimides, but he somehow defined my next steps. The archive mingles with my memory, and I try to recall that first contact with a major exhibition, a size later reflected in the Athens Biennale or the first attempts at exhibitions at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, hosted, at the time, in the basement of the Athens Concert Hall. Looking through the press cuttings brings back memories of news reporting of the past. Scandal, censorship, yellow journalism and works being taken down. There were such reactions to every one of Joachimides’ exhibitions; he sought them himself, he tugged on the rope — against boredom, challenge.

The exhibition, as I look at it anew today, is free of surprises and with certain associations that I fail to understand (aesthetic and conceptual leaps), but that does not diminish the sense of admiration that persists to this day — 19 years later, the extravaganza of the image and the work that, in its material form, holds you captive in the space.

While I, myself, remain obstinately attached to theory and while I am interested in creating connections — or conflicts — that can be substantiated linguistically or by spatial traces, the curatorial practice of Joachimides brings a sense of liberation and conceptual comfort. Endless texts are replaced by a page or two, a diagram allowing you to navigate as you like, always a gesture to engage you with the spirit of the era, to stay in the now, integrating historical memory (with — we ought to mention, at this point — its gaps and its inconsistencies, and the extremely discreet presence or total absence of female artists). A sense of existing alongside the works replaces rambling references and maniacal documentation.

Joachimides’ major exhibitions — A New Spirit in Painting (1981), Zeitgeist (1982), German art in the Twentieth Century (1985), Metropolis (1991), American Art in the 20th Century (1993), as well as Outlook (2003) — also reflect their respective eras. Starting from the ’80s and running through to the 2000s, these are larger-than-life exhibitions (Go big or go home). I don’t think he would still choose to make exhibitions that way, aware, as always, of the spirit of the present day, and the saturation of the spectacle.

His persistence in presenting his contemporary era through the form and a broad theme connected to place is particularly interesting, with the choice of each city functioning as a sort of prediction: he proposes Berlin of Metropolis after the fall of the wall as a potential centre of artistic action — a gesture that was criticised at the time [iii] but validated by history. He then shifts his interest from the art centres to the periphery, and proposes a case study based on the city. His works prepares us for what is to follow, if you think about Documenta in Athens, or the global “biennalistic” paroxysm, with new biennales popping up in various cities. Finally, what has stayed with me are his thoughts on the art production process, which may contribute to political action — in contrast to art as illustration of politics —, which powerfully showcase the relationship between art and the political and social field.


Malvina Panagiotidi: In an interview to the German journal Kunstforum International on the occasion of the Die Epoche der Moderne. Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert exhibition, which he co-curated in 1997 with Norman Rosenthal, Joachimides explained that “history of art can be read like a palindrome” [iv]. It was in such a way, I think, with palindromic movements and explorations, that I attempted, as I wandered through his books, to read his ideas, the intersections of his exhibitions and his preoccupations, his narratives on his own “today”.

I had the good fortune of knowing him personally and to have heard him tell many stories about his exhibitions and his views on art. In the course of this workshop, however, and during the time we spent in the attic of the ASFA, I was interested — taking on a role somewhere in between artist and researcher/detective — in finding, in his books, traces of the contradictions, the experiences and the powerful images, the three features that characterise his curatorial practice in most exhibitions.

What experience do we seek in an exhibition? What “longed-for otherness” do we hope to meet in looking at one? These are questions he posed throughout his career and which I also often explore myself. I will focus, at this stage, on the fact that he wasn’t interested in some theoretical context in his exhibitions, but in senses and powerful meanings. “Today, we do not need pretentious and ostentatious theories on exhibitions, but to restore their primary sensuous significance” [v], he writes in his text for the Outlook exhibition catalogue. In most catalogues, his texts are short and direct, often highlighting that his intention is an open communication system for taking in his exhibitions, rather than a closed, linear narrative.

Each exhibition has its own challenges. Joachimides curated historically orientated exhibitions, such as American Art in the 20th Century. Painting and Sculpture 1913–1993 (Berlin/London, 1993) and Die Epoche der Moderne. Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1997), as well as exhibitions seeking the pulse of their time, such as Zeitgeist (Berlin, 1982), Metropolis (Berlin, 1991) and Outlook (Athens, 2004). What is important to me, however, is that fact that, in both cases, what he wanted was exhibitions that start up a dialogue through the associations and intersections that compose that musicality that he explored in his exhibitions, that alternation of rhythm and experience. When he was asked what type of exhibition curation interests him the most, he replied that he likes to go to the opera in his spare time. “Don Giovanni, a head from Gandghara in India and a work by Katharina Fritsch create a concerto,” he used to say. [vi]

During our visits to his library, which contains very important exhibition catalogues, books on the history of art, western, as well as the African and Asian art that he loved, and important journals, mostly German, I focused my gaze on a large chest of drawers that sits there. That precious chest of drawers contains all the posters of the exhibitions he curated or visited, to discover his own “today”, his own Zeitgeist (spirit of the era), which haunts it. From the Greek Realities exhibition and the posters for Zeitgeist, from Martin-Gropius-Bau to Pavlos’ exhibition at the gallery of Iolas and political exhibitions in independent venues in Germany. In a way, these posters reflect the curatorial exploration of Joachimides. Like traces and inscriptions of memory, they condense each current moment, each today, while reflecting their relationship to the past and looking towards the uncharted future.

More than anything that makes up his profile as a curator, however, what stays with me is the close relationship Joachimides sought to have with the artists, his ability to brew and cocreate his practice with artistic production. Friendships between artist and curator also function as palindromes. Those relationships, such as 25 years of friendship with Joseph Beuys, which, as he told it himself, defined him, also entail a political dimension with a deeper meaning. We could think of them as relationships that can “build worlds”.


Evita Tsokanta: In my effort to draw some conclusions on the work of Christos Joachimides, I focused on three landmarks in his career, in the belief that, taken together, they reveal certain common features that run through his curatorial practice, while demonstrating its development. I began with his first major exhibition in 1974 at the ICA in London for German Month: Art in Society — Society in Art. The exhibition was the result of his collaboration with the ICA’s curator, Norman Rosenthal, who sought Joachimides’ contribution while doing research in Berlin.

In his curatorial statement, Joachimides suggests that the only way to make use of art politically is through constant and intensive review of the medium that produces it itself. The entire exhibition is a scandalously ground-breaking trial that reflects the spirit of the experimental works on which it was based. The seven participating artists, Hans Haacke, Joseph Beuys and Gustav Metzger included, contributed to the exhibition event through a symposium that preceded it in Berlin, aimed at bringing about an ideological osmosis with the organisers, for the collective design of the exhibition and the works that comprised it. Inclusiveness wasn’t merely a tool, but an imperative for both the artists and the curators. At a time when Europe and Germany, foremost, was still divided, such a curatorial choice was indeed a political statement in itself. A year later, instigated by the fall of the Junta, Christos Joachimides curated an exhibition for Greek Month at the same British institution.

A few years later, in 1977, at the Goethe Institute in Athens, Joachimides led a series of events on art. The events consisted of a lecture by the curator, entitled, once again, Art in Society, an exhibition by Dieter Hacker and a seminar taught by Joachimides, Dieter Hacker and Vlassis Kaniaris. The curator’s lecture referred to the social unrest that broke out globally in the late ’60s and the way artists responded to it. With the emergence of new art media, such as actions, “interdisciplinary” art and “events-performances”, artists renegotiated the role of art, adopted a critical stance to their social surroundings and, ultimately, redefined their relationship with the recipient of their work. “Their intention was not to make ‘political art’, but to make art political,” Joachimides concludes, underlining the social role that contemporary visual creation may potentially play in the transitional years of the Greek Metapolitefsi. The purpose of the seminar was to “incorporate the personal creative work” of the participating artists. Once again, the concept of co-creation that arises from dialectic inclusiveness between curator and artists was a central port of Joachimides’ methodology in his effort to broaden the curatorial medium.

Outlook opened in 2004, as part of the Cultural Olympiad in Athens. This was a landmark exhibition for the domestic visual arts scene, which, for yet another time in Joachimides’ career, caused a stir. In his text, he states that the exhibition aspires to “give an impression of how the art of our time is expressed and where it is headed, austerely, selectively, and by clearly defined aesthetic criteria”. He stresses that an exhibition ought to create a sensual experience for its visitor, in order to lead them to recognise contemporary art as something familiar, with which they may identify. As his vehicle in that direction, the curator selects what he calls monumental works with a “strong visual presence”, that have the potential of seducing their viewer. In short, he suggests yet again that the medium itself and the evolution of the form of the artwork are factors that enable the viewer to decode it and, as a result, create true social impact.

One of the exhibition’s major achievements was the borrowing of Joseph Beuys’ artwork Directional Forces from the collection of the Berlin Museum, which had been shown, in its original version, at the ICA during German Month in London. This borrowing forges an imaginary connection between the two exhibitions, thirty years apart, and, perhaps, completes a cycle in the curator’s professional journey. It is almost as if he wants to remind future researchers of his archive that his curatorial career is characterised by consistency and dedication to the artists who originally defined his own perception of art, as well as the history of art itself. At the same time, that gesture is a tacit claim upon the important journey of the particular work, as well as Beuys himself, and, as such, a validation of the curator’s aesthetic judgment.

The process of selecting works for Outlook speaks of a reversion to Joachimides’ earlier insistence on collective fermentation as a tool for exploring the curatorial medium towards prioritising dogma-free aesthetic criteria. His faith in the ability of aesthetics to excite viewers autonomously from explanatory context is apparently accompanied by his growing trust in his personal judgement to discern what will touch the audience and, consequently, what makes a work aesthetically complete. On the one hand, one could argue that this attitude, with the elitism it may entail, is an inherent quality of the profession. On the other hand, one could assume that at this mature stage of his career, Joachimides equates his — by now educated — sense with the instinct of the viewer.

Through this brief review, I conclude that, in the course of Joachimides’ career, his exhibitions are focused progressively less on the art world, and more of the widest possible audience an exhibition of contemporary art can capture. He did not underestimate the viewer; he asked for their active contribution, as an equal participant in an art event and, by extension, as an active social being. Correspondingly, he cultivated empirically a deep faith that the visual medium itself, the beauty of the landscape, as he claims, manages to be universally recognisable, has the power to create the impact required so that it can ultimately play the social role it ought to have. His early experiments in the curatorial process seem to have established his certainty on the potential of a work of art.

In attempting to decode the course of a historical curator through the bibliography and archival material he chose to bequeath as evidence of his legacy, I come to a personal testimony. In Christos Joachimides’ obituary in The Art Newspaper, in 2017, his friend and colleague Norman Rosenthal used the phrase: “Truth must also be beautiful”. It is a phrase attributed to Brecht, which Rosenthal chose as the synopsis and final word on Joachimides’ professional life. The same phrase was used as the title for his curatorial statements, both in the exhibition catalogue for Art in Society — Society in Art in London in 1974, and for Outlook in Athens in 2004. It is my belief that, in the use of this quote, the term “truth” represents the social role of art, a view that he advocated from his very first steps, while the term “beauty” his undeniable aesthetic power. The poetic absolutism of the phase is, perhaps, the most concise rendering of the modus operandi of a curator who was as much a product of his time as the exhibitions he created.

Translated by Daphne Kapsali.


[i] Glenn Phillips, Philipp Kaiser, Doris Chon, Pietro Rigolo (ed.), Harald Szeemann. Museum of Obsessions, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2018. Florence Derieux (ed.), Harald Szeemann - Méthodologie individuelle, JRP|Ringier, 2008. Christa Benzer, Christine Böhler, Christiane Erharter (ed.), Continuing Dialogues: A Tribute to Igor Zabel, JRP|Ringier, 2009. Ank Leeuw Marcar, Willem Sandberg: Portrait of an Artist, Valiz/Werkplaats Typografie, 2014. Anna Tellgren (ed.), Pontus Hultén and Moderna Museet: The Formative Years, Koenig Books/Moderna Museet, 2017.
[ii] Joachimides’ fellow travellers were the Swiss Jean-Christophe Ammann (1939–2015), the Italian Germano Celant (1940–2020), the Belgian Jan Hoet (1936–2014), the Dutch Rudi Fuchs (1942), the German Kasper König (1943), the French Jean-Hubert Martin (1944) and the British Norman Rosenthal (1944) and Nicholas Serota (1946).
[iii] See Norbert Messler, “Berlin: ‘Metropolis’”, Artforum, Summer 1991. https://www.artforum.com/print/199106/berlin-metropolis-33783.
[iv] Interview by Christos Joachimides to Amine Haase: “Kunstgeschichte kann man lesen wie Palindrome. Amine Haase sprach mit Christos Joachimides über seine ‘Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert’”, Kunstforum International, issue 138, 1997, pp. 482–488.
[v] Christos Joachimides (ed.), Outlook, Greek Culture Promotion Organisation SA, Athens, 2003.
[vi] Interview by Christos Joachimides to Amine Haase, Kunstforum International, pp. 482–488.