Yulia Belousova - EN

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Ephemeral "6", Berlin / Anne Fellner / Burkhard Beschow & Kerim Seiler

In 2017, I had the chance to represent Bernard Magrez at the Art Brussels fair. I visited the stands of this beautiful fair one by one, discovering galleries and fascinating artists. Exhausting by hours of visit, I stopped at the snack bar of the fair. Swallowing my sandwich, I met Yulia Belousova. She is a young curator based in Berlin and working on many projects. After graduating from the University of Hamburg and the University of Naples, she worked in several galleries. She is also an entrepreneur because she has created the Ephemeral Dinners that merge gastronomy and art while working to multiply the social links and the visibility of emerging artists.

Interview

"You become a curator by exploring new narratives and ways of presenting and telling the stories by the artist that you understood and want to present to the rest of the world." 

​YAR : When did you become interested in art? What is your background?
I’m endlessly thankful to my mother who has been always interested in arts and dragged me and my brother into museums since our childhood. I clearly remember as I was 3 years old walking through the Tretyakov Gallery, I had a bowl haircut and looked almost like a boy. There was that painting from 1909 with a one-shoulder dress, I would pool down one slice of my shirt and walk through the museum as if I’d walk out of the painting.
Nowadays it’s a usual practice to see kids in exhibition halls sitting on the floor and drawing, but in the 90ies in Moscow it was something unheard-of, so I’m even more surprised that it was another thing that my parents used to do with us.
Contemporary arts wasn’t a term in Russia and as I went to high school my plan was to study finance & banking in Moscow. But the universe had another plans for me, I got a scholarship from Germany and moved to Bonn, later on to Hamburg and studied art history and media and communication science in Hamburg, Naples and Berlin.

​I had a first art world internship at the age of 17, that was followed by gallery internships, researching for artists, worked at König Gallery Berlin and took on any art job that spoke to me.  

Could you explain the projects you are working on?
I am the founder and artistic director of the non-profit exhibition series called Ephemeral Dinner, that are happening about 3 times per year in a new city promoting young talents and re-creating the idea of mentoring within the art world. Currently I’m programming the conversation series and events for TheOthers Art fair happening in Turin 1-4.November, representing it as one of the members of the Curatorial Board, writing as a freelance journalist for several magazines, curating the new independent cultural space ДINAMIKA in Moscow and working on an educational project that I can’t spoil yet. 

Organised around an exhibition and a dinner, what are exactly the Ephemeral dinners ?
​Ephemeral Dinner is an exhibition and a dinner at the same time with a limited duration of one night only. The priority number one is the exposition of works by a young artist who doesn’t have a gallery representation yet. The show aims to get visibility for the artist and to find a special location that will reflect and fit the works, not vice versa as it’s typical for a gallery show. The second aim is putting the young artist in contact with an established one to create some sort of mentoring and friendship between two generations. They are discussing the menu for the dinner that will happen within the exhibition, shopping and cooking together and this simple but yet time-consuming exchange on the daily-basis leads hopefully to a future friendship and enriching experience. 

Ephemeral Dinner "5", Berlin / Minor Alexander & Gregor Hildebrandt

The third part is the dinner itself: while we install a show for one night, prepare the food and drinks and invite a mixed crowd of about 20 guests including art professionals and collectors and interesting personalities but students or anybody else. It’s a charming caricature on the format of a gallery dinner, but yet beautiful night followed by a cocktail for 50 more participants and creating a sort of a musketeer community within the art world at the end. Plus it gives an opportunity for people from outside of the art world to get a glimpse of how we live and a direct contact with the artist themselves. It’s an unconditional theatrical piece that everyone is experiencing in the roles of an actor and observer at the same time. ​

How do you choose the emerging artist you highlight during the Ephemeral dinners ?
Inner feeling. Based on experience and a trained eye.

TheOthers art fair is one of the main independent fair in Italy. It is dedicated to international emerging artist. It shows galleries of course and also artist-run and project spaces with artists and curators. Each time is different, the goal is to recover captivating disused buildings : this year it will be hosted in the former Hospital Regina Maria Adelaide, a historical building inaugurated in 1887.  Finally the fair is a place for experimental formats of exhibitions and site-specific projects, it seems to be more than a fair ! What project are you making for TheOthers art fair?
Firstly, I was appointed as one of the curators for the Curatorial Board of the fair. Which is a genius thing for a young fair like TheOthers to choose few young international curators to represent the fair and to select international galleries, project spaces and non-profits to invite. After I finished this summer the projects that I was programming for Soho House Berlin, I was asked to help programming a series of events for TheOthers. I put together a Conversation Series including talks on some of the most relevant matters in today’s Independent art sector, such as the future of the gallery market - does a gallery need a physical space, the future of independent art publishing, beyond the traditional art fair model and „why is today’s art so meaningless“- talks. Our curatorial board will give their highlight-tours of the fair and few more surprises to follow.

How did you start as a curator ? What are the keys to become a curator ?
I believe it’s the same as being an artist: you just do something you love and one day you give it a name: „Who am I? What am I doing? - Curating. Taking care of artists and their shows“. You hang the first paintings on the wall, just to say, or occupy a former parking garage and throw a show there, you do another one and so on. You become a curator by exploring new narratives and ways of presenting and telling the stories by the artist that you understood and want to present to the rest of the world. Even a simple presentation needs a concept as a foundation, a narrative and a story that you want to tell. 
Not to forget, to become a curator one needs to know the history of arts, to love it, to read a lot and see as much as possible (till you can’t see arts anymore).

​Your eye on emerging creation : what are the artists to follow ? Who are the artists who inspire you as a curator ?
As an art historian and a cultural nerd I adore the 60s in every way, starting from the Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art to Fluxus and Arte Povera. Geographically and historically. The list is long including Ear Art founder Spoerri, his friends and colleagues Yves Klein, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys and many more. Francis Alys, Philippe Pareno, early Tiravanija, Paulo Nazareth, Laure Prouvost, Christian Falsnaes, Rayyane Tabet, Nora Turato, Hiwa K.

A culture advice ?
​The Square for an easy-going evening to laugh on ourselves wishing the art world circus, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) by Andy Warhol to change and simplify the way we think, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (2015) movie to learn what collecting really means, Anecdoted Topography of Chance by Daniel Spoerri.
I haven’t been to the new show on Harald Szeeman in Düsseldorf yet, but it’s on my list. 

A tip for young professional ?
Keep going, keep an inner naive and curious child, keep asking and questioning, but never forget - quality over quantity. And my favourite by my friend Christoph Kohlhöfer: when you get what you need you lose what you want. 

 Interview by Livia Perrier

​Some links
Ephemeral Dinners
The Other fair

Photo copyrights
Anastasia Lobanova