Image: Pushkin House, London
Charles Esche is scheduled to give a lecture on 20 November 2026 that asks what curating becomes when the institutions that house it become more concerned with their own survival than with making art possible.
In the lecture, Esche draws on his forthcoming book ‘Never There Yet: Possibility and the Limits of Institutional Curating’, due from Sternberg Press in 2026, as well as his twenty years as director of the Van Abbemuseum, to propose three functions that might organise curatorial work beyond programming.
The first, rearranging, redistributes what legacy institutions already have; the second, instituting and constituting, builds new forms where legacy institutions cannot reach; and the third, subsisting, holds memory and possibility open for the times when they may be needed again.
These functions emerge from Esche’s engagement with infrastructural critique and decolonial thinking, alongside his concept of ‘demodernising’, described as a reckoning with modernity and modernism from this side of the colonial divide. Esche is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam, was director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven from 2004 to 2024, and is developing ‘demodernising’ as a methodology for western Europeans to approach decolonial thinking.
The lecture forms part of Pushkin House’s Frame programme, which convenes curators, artists, creatives and thinkers to examine the evolving agency of art and the responsibilities of cultural workers. It will be followed by a moderated discussion with Pushkin House Director Elena Sudakova and an audience question-and-answer session.
