Dr Clémentine Deliss works across the borders of contemporary art, curatorial practice, independent publishing, and critical anthropology. She studied art and anthropology in Vienna, Paris and London, and received her Ph.D. from the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. She is currently Associate Curator of KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, where she is developing the Metabolic Museum-University and publishing new editions of “Metronome”, the artists’ and writer’s organ she has produced since 1996.
Between 2010–2015, she directed the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main instituting a new research lab and developing several exhibitions including “Object Atlas – Fieldwork in the Museum” (2011); “Trading Style” (2013) “Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger)” (2014), and “El Hadji Sy – Painting, Performance, Politics” (2015). In 2016, she developed the cross-disciplinary gathering, “Dilijan Arts Observatory” in Armenia, which she subsequently curated for the exhibition “Hello World. Revising a Collection” held in 2018 at the National Galerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.
In 2018 she was Visiting Professor at the Ecole nationale supérieure d’arts Paris-Cergy and held an International Chair at the Laboratoire d’excellence des arts et médiations humaines, Université Paris 8 and Centre Georges Pompidou. In 2018-19, she was Interim Professor of Curatorial Theory and Dramaturgical Practice at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. Between 2019-2020, she taught art theory and history at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg.
She was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study Berlin, is a Mentor of the Berlin Program for Artists, and Faculty at Large of SVA Curatorial Practice. In 2020, she co-directed Home Museum (homemuseum.net) for African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos. Her recent book “The Metabolic Museum” (2020) was published by Hatje Cantz in co-production with KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin and has recently come out in Russian translation published by Garage Museum, Moscow. Her study offers the concept of the Metabolic Museum as an interventionist laboratory for remediating ethnographic collections for future generations.
