Since 2008 Pieter Boons (°1980, BE) has been affiliated with the Middelheim Museum and in 2017 he has been appointed curator. The Middelheim Museum is 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. Therefor 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 soloshows: Ria Pacquée and Ana Mendieta. For the coming projects in 2020, the Middelheim Museum will function as an urban postcolonial utopia, unfolding its own unseen colonial history in the exhibition Congoville (13 june 2020 – 18 okt 2020) and the symposium Zooming in – Zooming out, on colonial monuments on march 20th 2020 (cocurated with Samuel Saelemakers).
Before his assignment as a curator, Pieter Boons was working under the name HEIMAT as an independant 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, intensly diverse and precarious projects ranging from lectures, screenings, exhibitions and editions as conversations on bridging disciplines and opinions.