A book that documents an oral presentation given by Pierre Bal-Blanc to a jury of professionals, as part of his application to curate the 7th Berlin Biennale. Devised as an exhibition in several acts, the session adheres to the rules of a score performed by its author or by a third party.
Draft Score For An Exhibition is both a book and a performative exhibition conceived by Pierre Bal-Blanc. The book documents an oral presentation given by Pierre Bal-Blanc to a jury of professionals in 2010, as part of his application to curate the 7th Berlin Biennale. Devised as an exhibition in several acts, the session adheres to the rules of a score performed by its author or by a third party.
The exhibition has been presented at Le Plateau, Paris; Secession, Vienna; CAC Brétigny; Institut Français du Portugal, Lisbon; Artissima Art Fair, Turin and Index-The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm.
Besides offering the reader the opportunity to examine the documentation of the previous performances, the book is meant to be an actual score to be performed by any potential reader.
Pierre Bal-Blanc is a French art critic and independent curator based in Paris and Athens. Editor-in-chief of the magazine Bloc Notes between 1998 and 2000, co-founder of the agency Design Mental, he directed the Contemporary Art Center of Brétigny-sur-Orge (Essonne) from 2003 to 2014. In 2017, he curated Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens. One of the most prominent curators of the contemporary art scene, Bal-Blanc's focuses his practice on paradoxes of perversion and transgression, living and object, via industrialization and processes of production. His exhibitions have been displayed at: CAC Brétigny/ Micadanses, Stuk Leuven, Tate Modern London, MoMA Warsaw, and Berlin Biennale, among many others. In 2017, he curated Der Canaletto Blick – The Canaletto View, a commission program for Easter Group Bank AG at the Erste Campus in Vienna, and in the same year he published the book Project Phalanstère (Sternberg Press, 2017).
