Hans Ulrich Obrist
For over a decade, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has assiduously dedicated himself to his mission of documenting interviews with every living artist and cultural figure that has piqued his curiosity. To date he has conducted over 600 interviews.
Obrist’s interest in interviews was first triggered by two very long conversations he read when he was a student. One was between Pierre Cabanne and Marcel Duchamp, and the other between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon. “These books somehow brought me to art,” says Obrist. “They were like oxygen, and were the first time that the idea of an interview with an artist as a medium became of interest to me. They also sparked my interest in the idea of sustained conversations–of interviews recorded over a period of time, perhaps over the course of many years; the Bacon/Sylvester interviews took place over three long sessions, for example.”
