JACOB FABRICIUS

Jacob Fabricius has curated numerous exhibitions in institutions, galleries and public spaces. From 2008 to 2013, he was director at Malmö Konsthall, and he is currently the director at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. In 1997, Fabricius founded the publishing house Pork Salad Press, with which he has published more than 50 books and records by artists, among them David Robbins’ Concrete Comedy (2011), Henrik Olesen’s What Is Authority? (2002) and, most recently, Olivia Plender’s Green Lines (2013).  In 2004, he founded the newspaper project Old News. Recently, he curated “Leisure, Discipline and Punishment” for Contour, the 6th Biennial of Moving Image in Belgium.

J.G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights. London: Flaming, 1996.

I read the book 15 years ago and was spellbound. I had read Ballard’s fantastic books before, but it’s Cocaine Nights I keep coming back to. It was quite an important text as a backdrop in my mind for an exhibition I did in 2001 called “New Settlements” at Kunsthallen Nikolaj, Copenhagen. Set in Estrella Del Mar, a Spanish resort for the very rich, the main character soon finds out that there is something completely rotten about the idyllic and wealthy villages where his brother is charged with murder. Behind the peaceful façade, there are dark secrets hidden, propelled by violence, rape and drugs. It’s a classic detective story but shows the twisted human mind when it is at its best and worst. “New Settlements” is one of my personal favorite projects, with works by Cady Noland, Chris Burden, Mike Nelson, Pia Rönicke, Bodys Isek Kingelez and Gerard Byrne, among others. I would like to do it again, or at least make a 3.0 version of it.

Michel Foucault. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1975.

Needless to say, the Contour exhibition, the 6th Biennial of the Moving Image, that I just curated in Mechelen, Belgium, is deeply influenced by Foucault’s groundbreaking research and writing. The title of the exhibition is “Leisure, Discipline and Punishment,” and it takes place on the premises of a football stadium, church and prison—all fully functioning venues—as well as a fourth venue, a museum-like space that was the former city court in Mechelen.

In The Birth of the Prison, Foucault has put Western penal systems into words, analyzing the social and theoretical mechanisms that are involved in penal structures, how order is produced, and how discipline and punishment are embedded in our culture. It’s a book that you can not do without if you have the slightest interest in the subject.

Umberto Eco. The Open Work. First published in 1962. Harvard University Press, 1989.

It is generally pretty impressive to be able to label Eco as semiotician, critic, philosopher and novelist. Eco masters these different genres impressively, and The Name of the Rose is somehow a beautiful mixture of these. However, I would like to mention the semiotic text The Open Work as a source of inspiration for me and some of the ways I have approached my job as a curator the last 15 years. Eco developed and coined the idea of the “open” text and “open” work and has talked about how the best literary texts are fields of meaning rather than strings of meaning, and how open texts are better because they breathe life into new ways of seeing and experiencing things in life and society. I have worked with his thoughts about the “open” work in exhibitions such as “S-tog” (1999), “Sandwiched” (2003) and “Auto Stop” (2008). In these exhibitions, interpretations of the artistic idea (or presentation of it) has come into curatorial play.