Over the course of your career as a curator, writer, and art advisor, you have navigated different phases of the art market and artistic production. What do you consider to be the new frontier of the contemporary world? What is “contemporary” today, what disrupts already familiar territories and signals the inception of a new vision?
What interests me today are practices that destabilise inherited systems of value. Not work that simply reacts to culture, but work that reprograms perception itself. The new frontier is not novelty for the sake of novelty, it is the ability to create new psychological, social, and emotional architectures that respond to our times. We have exhausted spectacle. We have exhausted irony. And we have exhausted redundant simple narratives. What feels urgent now is intensity, intimacy, friction, contradiction and maintaining authenticity. Artists who are capable of creating environments that alter how people experience time, memory, identity, politics, and collective presence are the ones defining the next era. I abhor the word disruption. But I greatly value the practice of moving forward against established, simplified narratives. But aesthetic aggression alone is not enough, nor is it interesting, rather it is the courage to produce meaning in a world addicted to speed and distraction. That is the new radicalism.
The vehicle is as significant as the message. In this sense, the curator becomes an amplifier of the artist’s vision, almost a prosthesis that allows the work to reach a higher plane. Starting from the recognition of an artist’s identity, which elements do you consider essential for the curator to function as a true force of amplification, rather than merely as a mediator?
Amplification requires precision and authenticity. It requires emotional intelligence, political awareness, spatial sensitivity, and above all, trust. The cultural producer has to understand not only what the artist is making, but why it must exist now, within this specific cultural moment. I see my cultural practice almost as frequency tuning. When done correctly, every element, architecture, sound, pacing, audience interaction, partnerships, communication, becomes part of a larger energetic system that intensifies the work’s impact. The danger is when cultural practitioners impose authorship in a way that neutralises the artist’s voice. I am not interested in control. I am interested in expansion. The strongest curatorial work creates conditions in which the artist’s language becomes impossible to ignore and we’re all better for it.
We inhabit a context of hyper-production and hyper-stimulation. How can art and curatorship avoid falling into repetitive schemes and predictable trajectories? On what foundations, in your view, is it possible to redefine the very conditions of artistic experience, generating a genuine conceptual evolution rather than a mere surface aesthetics?
At the moment we are producing culture at the speed of content. Hyper-production creates aesthetic fatigue. Everything becomes instantly consumable and instantly forgettable. We need to move away from projects designed purely for visibility and return to works that generate psychological and intellectual residue. For me, genuine conceptual evolution begins with discomfort. And it begins with questioning inherited structures instead of endlessly recycling them through different visual languages and repeated narratives. I am less interested in polished aesthetics than in works capable of destabilising perception or exposing hidden systems of power. The most important cultural movements are never born from consensus. They emerge from rupture.
I would like to return to the origins of Nazhand Art & Culture: what were the most significant difficulties and challenges you faced in founding this platform? What insights emerged from those initial fractures, which have since consolidated into an international reality?
Founding Nazhand Art & Culture ten years ago required building something independent in an ecosystem deeply shaped by gatekeeping and hierarchy. One of the greatest challenges is refusing the pressure to conform to established models of legitimacy. I was never interested in simply participating in the art world as it existed. I wanted to create intersections between art, music, fashion, architecture, nightlife, activism, and public discourse in a way that reflected how culture is actually experienced. At the beginning, many people viewed that hybridity with skepticism and dismissed its legitimacy, and its ability to function as a viable business model. Some still do much to their own detriment…. But the fractures became the foundation. Being underestimated teaches you how to build with precision. It forces you to develop instinct, resilience, and clarity of vision. And most importantly it teaches you to neutralise toxic voices. What has emerged over time is an international platform rooted not in trend, but in cultural intuition and long-term relationships. I think people respond to authenticity when it is uncompromising.
Your practice carries a pronounced socio-political dimension, embodying the idea of art as an instrument for consciousness and transformation of thought. Today, there seems to be an increasing urgency to speak, to be heard, and to bring social tensions to the fore. Where, in your view, does the true short-circuit occur: in the audience’s perception, or in a misdirection of the artistic message itself?
I think the short-circuit happens in both places simultaneously. On one hand, audiences are overwhelmed by constant information and emotional saturation. Attention itself has become fragmented. On the other hand, there are artistic practices that mistake visibility for depth and reduce political engagement to aesthetics or symbolism. Real socio-political art cannot function as branding. It has to carry risk. It has to disturb comfort zones, including those of the institutions presenting it. What interests me is work that creates cognitive dissonance; work that forces people to confront contradictions they would rather avoid. The role of art is not to provide moral decoration. It is to destabilise passive perception and generate new forms of consciousness. The challenge today is that everything is immediately absorbed into image culture. So the question becomes: how do we create experiences that cannot be consumed passively? That is where the real work begins.
In the spirit of new beginnings and new responsibilities, what are your expectations? How does this new chapter reinterpret the sensibilities and insights of your past work? What might those observing with a broader gaze anticipate? Are there trajectories already emerging that you would be willing to share?
Nazhand Art & Culture is now ten years old! I see this new chapter less as a reinvention and more as an expansion of ideas that have always existed within my practice. The scale may evolve, the platforms may evolve, but the core intention remains the same: to create cultural experiences that challenge passive consumption and generate meaningful exchange. What interests me moving forward is building ecosystems rather than isolated events. Long-term cultural infrastructures that connect artists, curators, musicians, architects, technologists, and audiences across disciplines and geographies. I am increasingly drawn to projects that operate simultaneously as artistic gestures, social environments, and political propositions. I think the future of curatorial practice lies precisely in that hybridity. There are definitely trajectories already emerging, larger public interventions, more immersive and interdisciplinary formats, deeper international collaborations, but what matters most to me is preserving intensity and integrity as the scale grows. Expansion is only meaningful if the vision remains uncompromised.
