Professor Charles Esche

Biography

Charles Esche is a curator and writer living between Amsterdam, Netherlands and Edinburgh, Scotland


He is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam. He is a member of L’Internationale Association and is developing the Three Ashes Foundation on land near Bucharest, Romania. He is professor of contemporary art and curating at University of the Arts, London and adviser at Jan van Eyck Academie and a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. He was director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2004-24) and of Rooseum in Malmö (2000-2004).

He has published in peer reviewed and other journals including on museums and exhibitions including Documenta 15/Lumbung 1 in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, on Anti-Fascist monuments in Third Text and on Demodernising in multiple titles. His latest book publications are The Museum is Multiple, Van Abbemuseum, 2024 and Art and Its Worlds, Afterall and Koenig Press, 2021. His book Never There Yet: Possibility and the Limits of Institutional Curating will be published by Sternberg Press/School of Visual Arts, New York in October 2026. He is also writing a book on Demodern Thinking with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti to be published by Duke University Press in 2027.

Among international exhibitions and biennales, he has (co-)curated Soils, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne and Van Abbemuseum, 2023-24; The Meeting That Never Was, MO Museum, Vilnius, 2022; Hurting and Healing, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, 2022; Power and Other Things, Europalia, BOZAR, Brussels 2017; Art Turns, World Turns; Museum MACAN, Jakarta 2017; Neither Forward nor Back Jakarta Biennale 2015; How to Talk about Things that don’t Exist, 31st Sao Paulo Bienal 2014, Ideal for Living, U3 Triennale, Ljubljana 2011; Play Van Abbe, 2009-11, RIWAQ Biennale, Palestine, 2007 and 2009; Istanbul Biennale, 2005 and Gwangju Biennale, 2002.

A valuable book is the reader Art and Social Change published by Afterall and Tate Publishing and co-edited by Esche and Will Bradley. He also co-edited a reader called The Netherlands, for example with Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova for the 2007 Venice Biennale. He has written for many art catalogues and magazines and a selection of his texts were published in 2005 under the title Modest Proposals by Baglam Press, Istanbul in Turkish and English, edited by Serkan Ozkaya.