Curator Juliane Bischoff On Remaining Attentive to the Conditions of the Present

Last month, Juliane Bischoff took over as curator for Portikus, the important Frankfurt institution known for its influential exhibitions on contemporary art. Portikus is the Kunsthalle of the renowned Städelschule and has hosted significant shows by the likes of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Martin Kippenberger, Isa Genzken, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Danh Vo, Simon Starling and Anne Imhof. Bischoff comes to Portikus from Klosterruine Berlin and we caught up with her to hear more about her plans for the institution.

Congratulations on the new job! What are some of your early priorities for it?

Thank you. At the moment, I am developing the program for the next two years, which involves initiating conversations with artists, but also carefully considering the tempo of the program and its modes of address. While Portikus has a long-standing commitment to site-specific commissions and spatial interventions, I am keen to further expand formats such as performance, film and discursive events in order to activate different registers of perception and engagement.

At the same time, I am reflecting on sustainability and on how long-term collaborations with other institutions might support artistic practices beyond the lifespan of a single exhibition. I am particularly drawn to site-responsive approaches that cultivate an attentiveness to place, environment and historical layers, yet are not confined to singular projects. By grounding precise interventions in specific contexts while situating them within broader global conditions, these practices can generate dialogues that extend across places and time. Given the urgent challenges of our time—rising nationalism, ongoing wars, extractive capitalism and accelerating climate crises—it feels crucial to reinforce pluralistic forms of discourse that move across borders.

From 2023 to 2025, you were artistic director of Klosterruine Berlin. What are the differences between curating in Frankfurt versus Berlin?

Both places have a very specific context. Portikus brings together nearly forty years of exhibition history, closely entwined with the Städelschule, while Klosterruine Berlin occupies the remains of a former monastery church and has functioned as a city-run, outdoor exhibition space only since 2016. Both venues are free of charge and accessible to a broad public, yet their operational conditions differ significantly. Klosterruine Berlin is highly constrained in terms of capacity, follows a seasonal rhythm and operates primarily on a local level, with public space as its curatorial field—albeit within Berlin’s dense landscape of project spaces, institutions and galleries. This offers a vivid discourse, one that is currently under serious threat due to drastic cuts in public funding.

Portikus, by contrast, has consistently championed experimental artistic practices across media and generations. It has introduced artists at pivotal early moments while also engaging figures whose work continues to shape contemporary discourse. The institution occupies a unique position between public exhibition space, pedagogical framework and international art context. The art school is part of its infrastructural framework and an important point of reference, while the institution maintains a strong international outlook. My approach is to build connections between local audiences and the international context present within the student body and the city, while also introducing practices, narratives and perspectives that have not yet, or only partially, been visible in Frankfurt.

What are some of your favorite past exhibitions at Portikus?

There are so many! I enjoy returning to them repeatedly. From the period in the former building at Schöne Aussicht, and considering the historical moment of their presentation, exhibitions by Isa Genzken (1993), Wolfgang Tillmans (1995), Steve McQueen (1997) and Renée Green (2002) stand out. In the current building, which has existed since 2006, I am particularly fond of exhibitions by Judith Hopf and Henrik Olesen, Lutz Bacher, Lucy Raven, Willem de Rooij, Pope.L and Simone Fattal, among others. I was also deeply impressed by the ways in which Michael Stevenson, Azad Raza and Adrian Piper engaged with the architecture and spatial logic of the building.

Additionally, Helke Bayrle’s film archive, titled “Portikus under construction,” is an extraordinary body of work in its own right. Between 1993 and 2002, she documented the construction of exhibitions at Portikus. The resulting films are not merely records of shows or portraits of artists, but intimate and subjective observations of creative processes. Today, this archive is accessible online and remains an invaluable document of the institution’s history.

Portikus is the Kunsthalle of the Frankfurt-based Städelschule. How does this relationship affect its curation?

The Städelschule is foundational to Portikus; the exhibition space was established by Kasper König in 1987 precisely in this context. Since 2024, Barbara Clausen has served as rector of the Städelschule and director of Portikus and we are in close dialogue about how to further articulate the exchange between the two institutions. While professors from the school have presented solo exhibitions at Portikus in the past, we are also exploring the reverse direction: inviting artists exhibiting at Portikus to engage with the school through workshops, lectures or guest professorships. This would allow for sustained encounters with artistic practices and foster deeper forms of exchange with students. Beyond this, students are actively involved in the installation and mediation of exhibitions, which feeds back into curatorial thinking on both practical and pedagogical levels.

Portikus has been known for formative early or mid-career exhibitions that later shaped broader contemporary art discourse, showing crucial early shows by artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Thomas Hirschhorn and Pierre Huyghe. How do you keep ahead of the curve, how does a curator anticipate what trends in art are going to go on to be influential?

Portikus offers a rare degree of freedom—to test new ideas, to take risks and to unsettle established formats. Many exhibitions mark moments in an artist’s practice when something unexpected is brought into focus. As a curator, I see my role in encouraging this process: ensuring that artists have time and resources, while also reflecting together on why a particular gesture or inquiry feels urgent in the present moment. I believe that sustained collaborations between artists and institutions generate effects that extend far beyond a single exhibition. In that sense, I am less concerned with anticipating trends than with remaining attentive to the conditions of the present—how they shape our ways of seeing art and how art, in turn, reshapes our understanding of the world.

You recently curated a show with Hiwa K, Tarik Kiswanson, Selma Selman, Hito Steyerl, Sung Tieu, Miloš Trakilović and Ian Waelder. What do these artists have in common for you?

These works came together within a very specific framework, the Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism in Munich. The exhibition addressed a pluralistic (post-)migrant European collective memory, asking how experiences of war, displacement and loss since 1945 have shaped, and continue to complicate, dominant historical narratives. The artists approached these questions from the perspectives of subsequent generations, probing which histories have been overwritten by political power, marginalized or silenced. While Europe’s nations remain globally militarized, the effects of these conflicts are suppressed through ever-stricter border regimes. The exhibited works resist reductive storytelling, tracing connections without flattening specific conditions and insisting on difference. Art is an act of creation and these practices do not merely imagine alternative futures, but ask how the present might be rendered livable for all.

How can Portikus expand its position as a space for artistic risk while remaining rooted in Frankfurt’s public sphere?

I don’t see this as a contradiction. Frankfurt is an internationally connected city—not only through global financial networks, but through its inhabitants and layered migration histories. There are outstanding collections and museums, such as the MMK and Schirn Kunsthalle, that present acclaimed international artists. And with Portikus, the understanding that art continually challenges the forms it can take seems well established.

Within this landscape, I see Portikus as an integral part of a pluralistic urban fabric. At the same time, contemporary socio-political pressures are placing immense strain on spaces of democratic openness, including cultural institutions. Collaborations with local and international partners can help address these challenges by initiating decentralized processes of transformation and enabling transversal forms of exchange. By situating my curatorial practice across these different scales, I hope to develop a program that resonates both locally and internationally, while remaining responsive to the urgencies of the present.