Adrian Notz is a curator who has organized and curated numerous exhibitions, events, conferences, actions and interventions with international artists, activists and thinkers at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and internationally. This year, he curated together with Cristina Bută, Monica Dănilă, Ann Mbuti, Edith Lázár, Cristina Stoenescu, Georgia Țidorescu the 5th edition of the Art Encounters Biennale, entitled My Rhino is not a Myth, dealing with the intersection of art, science and fiction.
You will read an authentic dialogue with Adrian Notz, who talks directly and honestly about the experience of organizing the biennial, the curatorial concept, and how he perceived the Romanian art scene.

I want to start with your professional path. During an interview, you said that initially, you wanted to become an artist, but you chose the path of curating. You have curated numerous exhibitions, events, and interventions at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and internationally. What stimulated you in this direction, and how would you define your curatorial approach?

I liked to call my curatorial approach “embedded curating” like “embedded journalists”. With this, I meant that I would do a deep dive with artists and embark on research with them. In the best case, we might even develop an artwork and exhibition together. This was always the way I liked to develop exhibitions, and in some cases, the exhibitions were secondary to the research itself. It was much more interesting to see how research inspired and influenced an artist’s work than doing the exhibition. It was great to see that years later, they would get back to a topic we had worked on together. This might also explain the first part of the question: As I would have become a bad artist, I preferred to accompany artists on their artistic endeavours and in that sense, “curate art”.

After studying the Theory of Art and Design at the Zurich University of Arts (ZHdK), you have dedicated 15 years to DADA; I quote: “I had devoted my whole life to Dada. Dada was my religion”), first as a curatorial assistant and co-director and later as the Artistic Director of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. What experiences have you accumulated during the whole period?
What were the most fascinating aspects of the Dada movement for you and the most challenging aspects of your day-to-day work as the Artistic Director of Cabaret Voltaire?

I can’t answer this question appropriately, as it might be too extensive. I have gathered much experience and knowledge over the 15 years with Dada. But I had to forget it all because I was in danger of becoming a Dada Automaton. The most fascinating aspect of Dada was that it could be applied in endless ways and hardly ever lost urgency and contemporaneity. The day-to-day challenges are the same everywhere when running a small art space: fund- and audience-raising, and justifying what you do to local politicians.

In 2019, you left Cabaret Voltaire and started a new journey as curator of the AI and art programme for the ETH AI Centre in Zurich. What was the context in which you made this shift in your career? Did it happen spontaneously, or was it a long-considered decision?

I left very consciously without having any follow-up plan in mind, i.e., I embarked on a journey of being jobless. Due to the pandemic and the lockdowns, all cultural places struggled a lot. Being unemployed in this context was a strange privilege in Switzerland, where there are good unemployment funds. Getting into AI and the ETH AI Center was similar to getting into Dada: It happened by chance and luck. In both cases, I had no specialist knowledge about the topics. An artist friend of mine, Nora Al-Badri, who was also in the Biennial, approached me with the idea of starting an AI+Art program at the ETH, the Federal Institute of Technology. Together, we got the funding to make a test run, which was so successful that I am still here, working with different faculties and artists on art and science projects over two years later.

You have collaborated with international artists, activists, and thinkers all around the globe. Is creating a strong and trustful bond challenging, especially with artists? How do you select the artists you work with?

I do not find it challenging to create a strong and trustful bond with artists. As you may have noticed, I have worked with many artists and stayed in close contact with them over the years. I select artists according to their work: I try to approach them if I like their work. But as my scope of “likes” and understanding is limited, for the Biennial, I collaborated with a team of six young curators, writers and art critics: Edith Lazar, Ann Mbuti, Georgia Țioderescu, Cristina Stoenescu, Cristina Buta, Monica Danila. Together as a collective, we decide which artists we would like to have in the show. Like this, I got to know a lot of new artists and, with some of them, managed to create a strong and trustful bond where we might collaborate in the future, even.

You were the curator of the Art Encounters Biennial, the 5th edition, which you organized alongside a board of young local curators. How did you receive the proposal to curate the 2023 Art Encounters Biennial?

I applied for it in early 2020. First, I was denied to do the 2021 edition and was invited instead to lead the Autumn School of Curating in Autumn 2020, which was fully online. Our NEW NOW Autumn School of Curating was a pleasant, surprising experience for all participants. We managed to form strong and trustful bonds as a group. Edith Lazar, Ann Mbuti, Georgia Țioderescu, Cristina Stoenescu, Cristina Buta and Monica Danila were also part of it, and in that sense, we continued the Autumn School. In March 2022, the final decision to have me as a curator for the 2023 editions was made official, and soon after that, I also suggested having a curatorial collective with Edith Lazar, Ann Mbuti, Georgia Tioderescu, Cristina Stoenescu, Cristina Buta, and Monica Danila to curate the show. Even if it was written everywhere that I was the curator, it was, in fact, the whole group who curated the show in a great collective collaboration.

For this edition of the Art Encounters Biennial, entitled- My Rhino is not a Myth – you have focused on the intersection between art, science, and fictions. Can you define the curatorial concept and tell us what inspired you to make this exciting association with Albrecht Dürer’s renowned work Rhinocerus, created in 1515 without the artist ever seeing the depicted animal?

One point not mentioned in the concept published on the website and catalogue is that I was on a research trip with the Swiss Arts Council to India and Bangladesh in April 2022. At that time, I also read about Dürer’s Rhino in a manifesto of the Aiiiii Art Center in Shanghai, where I gave a talk later. They compared Dürer to an AI application: Dürer did text to image. On my research trip, I was also in Goa, where the rhino was shipped. My mother is from Goa, too. So, I was, of course, very much interested, also personally, in that story of the rhino being a typical one of how not only colonial goods but also knowledge from the colonies was imported to Europe, something that David Graeber describes very nicely in “Dawn of Everything”, what was also an important inspiration for the Biennial. Our Rhino was being very anarchist on that beach in Goa.

You have exhibited 60 artists from 20 countries whose art penetrated 23 spaces in Timișoara, from exhibition spaces to complementary platform spaces, as well as areas dedicated to events. Can you describe the whole experience as curator of the Art Encounters Biennial 2023?  

We were only in charge of 8 spaces, which was already plenty, as we tried to have an installation of almost each of the artists. Our experience as curator of this biennial was, of course, intense. The biennial turned out to be a surprise for me: We managed to install all the artists. Only the artwork “The Bird, A Bone And Other Witnesses In A Museum Fire » by Sahil Naik, who actually brought a Rhino from Goa, was not installed in time for the opening. This was a pity because his work was really central to the biennial. It was a surprise also to work in the collective, which functioned extremely well. We were very fast in finding collective solutions, trusted each other on the decisions, and surprised each other by bringing in artists and artworks we didn’t know in advance. It was also nice to have almost half of the artists there for the opening, some travelling all the way from Mexico and India. This was a pleasant surprise. And then, I can also say that the catalogue turned out really great.

The biennial lasted eight weeks. During the biennial, did you supervise the way the exhibition was received; did you encounter different situations in which you had to make adjustments based on the feedback you received?

No, I didn’t. I could only be there during the opening, in the middle, for our art and science conference and for the closing, which was also the launch of the catalogue. But we had very good mediators who were the hosts of the exhibitions and who owned them. We also had an excellent and very devoted production manager, Raluca Durbaca, who, until the last minute of the biennial, took care of everything that wasn’t working, and Ioana Gonțea, the Operational manager, was a great solution-oriented collaborator. The Romanian curators from our collective were there more often, as they also hosted some screenings during the Biennial.

This was your first contact with the Romanian contemporary art scene and the Romanian public. What impression did we leave on you? How close or far are we from the international art scene?

This wasn’t my first contact with the Romanian contemporary art scene. My first contact was in 2006 when I curated the exhibition “Dada East? The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire”. In this time, the contemporary art scene has developed a lot and expanded enormously. There are not only a lot of exciting young artists and artists’ run spaces but also a lot of emerging galleries. Although most of these artists, spaces and galleries are part of the international art scene, the scene tends to be hermetic: You see many Romanian artists in the same Romanian art spaces.

The interview is part of the project REPERE, an approach through which I aim to present outstanding people, with a beautiful and healthy professional career, with inspirational stories, people who have transformed Timișoara into an effervescent cultural city through numerous exceptional events initiated and coordinated over time, but also on the occasion of the celebration of holding the title of European Capital of Culture.

This journalistic material was made through the financing program Energie! Burse de creație, supported by the Municipality of Timișoara, through the Center for Projects, within the Power Station component of the National Cultural Program “Timișoara – European Capital of Culture in the Year 2023”. The material does not necessarily represent the position of the Center for Projects of the Municipality of Timișoara, and this one is not responsible for its content or manner it may be used.