Since 2008 Pieter Boons (°1980, Belgium) has been affiliated with the Middelheim Museum and in 2017 he has been appointed curator.
The Middelheim Museum was founded in 1950 as an open air museum for contemporary sculpture in a protected landscape. It’s a free and open air museum where a permanent display of some 500 artworks are being altered with temporary exhibitions. The Middelheim likes to experiment in close collaborations with contemporary artists often resulting in making new commissions, tailor-made for the museum collection or the exhibitions. Therefore Pieter Boons ‘ curatorial practice needs to be hands-on and so it often starts pragmatically from the making itself of artworks or exhibitions. He has worked very closely with artists such as Roman Signer, Erwin Wurm, Kader Attia, Monster Chetwynd, William Forsythe and Andrea Zittel amongst others. Although most projects test the resilience of sculpture in the most broad sense, the projects relate themselves to an (inter)national zeitgeist where issues as gender, power structures, the politics of identity and the history of imperialism are never far away. In 2019 the museum had a big focus on performance art, programming national and international pioneering artists in an extensive performance program and in 2 solo shows: Ria Pacquée and Ana Mendieta. For the coming projects in 2021, the Middelheim Museum will function as an urban postcolonial utopia, unfolding its own unseen colonial history in the exhibition Congoville (29 May – 3 October 2021). Before his assignment as a curator, Pieter Boons was working under the name HEIMAT as an independent architect, scenographer and cultural producer for Designvlaanderen, Flanders Fashion Institute, SMAK, BOZAR & M Leuven amongst others. In Borgerhout, suburbian Antwerp, he co-initiated and artist run space Conflictroom (2010) and ran his own HEIMAT projectspace (2012-2017), both independent alternative art platforms. He worked with Arthur Zmjevski, Wendy Morris, Sarah Vanagt, Rinus van de Velde, Luc Deleu, Bernhard Willhelm, Manor Grunewald and many others in often short, intensely diverse and precarious projects ranging from lectures, screenings, exhibitions and editions as conversations on bridging disciplines and opinions. I am curious about mid-career artists who work sculpturally. We have a new program line where we make one new outdoor work with a mid-career artist that works in the museum for a year. These can be artists who already have some or no experience working in the open air or public space. In terms of area of interest, I continue to find that I know very few artists of color so there I am always curious to meet new voices. I find the whole question of identity a fascinating theme in the field of gender, for example. I’ve been playing with the idea of doing something around queerness for a long time (we often get requests in line with existing city festivals such as queer arts festival or lgbtq film programs) but often run up against a wall of vagueness or insufficient maturity in that theme.
You can already feel that current themes interest me to work with as a city museum.
Towards 2023 we are going to work on an intersection of sculpture and dance so if there are any suggestions I would also like to hear them. And of course, as an architect by training, the intersection with architecture is also something I continue to look at.