Alex Klein

Please introduce yourselves and describe your roles at KADIST.

Émilie Villez

I’m Émilie Villez and I’ve been director of KADIST in Paris for about five years. I’ve worked here since 2008, when we were a staff of only two. The institution has evolved: we’ve hired two more people and developed the team’s organization. When the cofounder of KADIST stepped down into a more advisory role in 2015, I was offered the chance to become director.

Marie Martraire

I’m Marie Martraire and I’ve worked at KADIST for about five years now. I started in our Asia program, and I’ve been director of KADIST in San Francisco since summer 2018. Our office has four full-time and two part-time staff.

AK

When was the organization founded?

EV

That’s a bit tricky. KADIST grew from a family collection that started around 2001. So, it existed in 2001 without any physical walls—no building, no program. At the end of 2006, we opened the space in Paris and began programming. The San Francisco space opened in 2011, after starting residencies and collection activities in 2010. KADIST grew and professionalized along the way. That’s why there are different versions of the history, and also why people can evolve within the structure, which I think is quite unusual as well.

It’s also why we made a book that came out at the end of 2018. I mention the book because it was a way for us to think rigorously about dates and when our official birthday would be, and also to get some clarity on what were previously blurry layers of history that involved different parts of the world. The publication is intended to evoke a kind of pocketbook, a traveling guide. It tries to cover the chronology of KADIST and at the same time pay homage to the people we’ve worked with over the years. We are an institution that stayed small, but there are still a lot of people involved—collection advisors, curators, and artists who have come for residencies or who we’ve worked with in other ways.

MM

The KADIST collection and foundation were started by a family—an uncle and niece—who had a strong interest in art. The niece, Sandra Terdjman, had studied contemporary art curating. From the outset they solicited the help of advisors. It is unusual for a private collection to have that kind of institutional aspect to it from the beginning, but very quickly, with meetings twice a year and different advisors bringing proposals to the table, it became democratic as well. Everyone on the committee has their say about which works enter the collection. Then, we started the residency programs in Paris and San Francisco. They are oriented toward supporting the artists who are represented in the collection.

AK

Why was San Francisco chosen as the other outpost, specifically?

MM

With home offices in two different locations, KADIST could support dialogues in local and international contexts and contribute to both scenes in different ways. Besides being the home bases for the founders, Paris and San Francisco were chosen as locations because the founders realized there weren’t many institutions of that scale at the time that could provide opportunities for dialogues and relationships.

AK

I’m intrigued by the shift from a private foundation and collection to a more public-facing nonprofit. Can you share some insights into that transition and the decisions behind it?

EV

It’s tricky—my use of the word “foundation” is from a French context, which is very different and can’t be applied to describe KADIST in the US context. The uniqueness of this organization is that it’s based in two very different cultural contexts. When we’re speaking from the French side, “private foundation” means a very clear step away from the public system. France has a long tradition wherein the state has always been the main cultural commissioner. These days we increasingly use the term “nonprofit” because it means something more similar across the two contexts.

Tausif Noor

What is the working relationship between the two home bases? Are they independent, or do they work together programmatically?

MM

It’s evolved a lot. Even though we share the same mission statement and we have worked with similar artists from the collection, for a long time we were almost like two separate institutions, KADIST Paris and KADIST San Francisco. Then, five or six years ago, we started working even more closely together and refined our spaces into two antennas of one international art organization called KADIST. We never had overlapping or competing programs because our local programs are quite context specific. So even for instance when an exhibition travels from one place to another (it only happened twice in our entire history so far), it is adapted to the context and is not exactly the same.

AK

So, do you develop your programs separately?

EV

They’re still rather separate, though we talk to each other a lot, keep each other up to date. San Francisco opened five years after Paris, so for five years we’d already had the residency process with artists and with curators. When we started KADIST in San Francisco, that programmatic identity came with it—that the artist’s residency was the founding element of the program. But they didn’t choose to start a curatorial residency. Instead, they invented a new program, which was the magazine residency. From the start, each program was a little independent. We were even wondering if we should consolidate more or not, until there was a decision, as Marie mentioned, to be clearer in terms of communication and having common strategies and formats.

These days, we tend to build the programs in parallel. Perhaps an artist will do a show in San Francisco, and later will do an event in Paris. Things are kind of free flowing. We’re working from the resource, which is the collection—that is the founding element. We’re not showing works from the collection, but we’re working with the artists represented in the collection. There’s a kind of common DNA in everything we do, but we don’t necessarily try to travel things. There’s a general coherence, but we’re working on a lot of international projects that only happen in Paris or in San Francisco.

AK

Is the collection a separate entity from the nonprofit? Does it stay with the family? Do you advise on acquisitions? How precisely does your programmatic strategy build out of those objects?

EV

We see the collection as one whole—we actually just shifted to a new software that allows us to see the collection this way. But we manage part of it in Paris and another part in San Francisco for logistical reasons. Obviously, it’s easier to ship work acquired within the United States to San Francisco. And both our advisors and staff participate in nominating new works for the collection. Sometimes we work with artists in the program and then they go into the collection, but most of the time it’s the other way around.

MM

For us, the collection is a point of departure in our relationships with artists. This is a first moment of financial support and an introduction to the practices. We then hope to develop long term conversations with them through different programs, commissions or online projects, and give people access to their work.

AK

You mentioned that you don’t show the collection. How is the collection made visible?

EV

We work with the collection by working with the artists in the collection. For instance, for the local programs right now, we’re working with artists, Pio Abad and Hikaru Fujii, on solo exhibitions that open in May. These are artists who are in the collection and they’re producing new work through the residencies that they did with us in both cities. Our gallery spaces are rather small—they’re project-size galleries. It is really a statement to maintain the small spaces so that we can put more resources into international projects. We keep the local venues and staff at a modest scale so that we can think about how to work with the collection in other contexts.

MM

The works in the collection are also available for loan and are sometimes presented in our international programs. We indeed started developing collaborations with institutions abroad—in Asia, Latin America, different places in Europe, all over the world, with small spaces and bigger spaces. Very often the curatorial discussions with these partners start by involving artists from the collection. This can lead to producing new works by those artists or showing work from the collection.

TN

We interviewed KHOJ [the International Artists’ Association, a nonprofit supporting contemporary art and emerging artists in South Asia, based out of New Delhi] and they mentioned that they did a commission with you, which is great.

AK

And you’ve also been working with our friends at Kunsthalle Lissabon.

TN

Is there a typical KADIST artist? Would you say there’s a specific type of artist you’re most frequently looking for—early career, mid-career? Are there criteria for acquisitions?

MM

Looking at the artists we are working with and our mission statement, it is clear that we work with artists who are addressing important issues of our time. All of them are engaged, whether politically, socially, economically, or environmentally—not necessarily in a direct way, but more through poetic gestures. They make work that may inspire you, or make you rethink your point of view about the world.

EV

The collection has become more focused over time. There’s a framework without it being formalized. The family has a history in philanthropy. We’ve always had artists of different generations in the collection, but we’ve been especially attentive to emerging artists because what we can offer in terms of the residency and the exhibitions helps the artist’s career become more international. They’ll be having their first solo exhibition in France, or somewhere in Europe, or maybe in the US.

AK

Is there a typical number of exhibitions or residencies per year at the two KADIST locations? I’m curious to hear a little more about the rhythms of the institution.

MM

We started with four exhibitions per year in each of our physical spaces, then went to three, which includes one solo presentation by the artist in residence. Starting next year, we will present two exhibitions. This rhythm emerged from a desire to devote more time, focus, and energy to the international projects. We manage at least one or two international projects per year per office.

EV

We also have a quite robust series of events in both San Francisco and Paris. In Paris, we have at least one event per month and in San Francisco we do about twenty public programs per year–this also relates to the inception of KADIST in San Francisco where we started presenting events before exhibitions.

AK

Does the family have to approve anything? Everything? How does that work structurally?

EV

In terms of governance, it’s always been collective, but it’s changed a bit over time. Here in Paris, we had a board, which was the same board as the collection’s, comprising family members and expert members. This has shifted as we’ve tried to settle on a model that is common between Paris and San Francisco. But basically, it’s the same structure—a board composed of family members plus expert members, in which Marie and I take part and to which we present the program proposals. As a group, we validate big decisions and strategic directions. We implement the mission statement and the guidelines. Then, as directors, Marie and I are pretty autonomous in terms of the programming.

TN

Where does the name KADIST come from? Is it an acronym?

MM

Good guess. It is an anagram of Tsadik which means “social justice” in Hebrew. It refers to the philanthropic roots of KADIST and the family.

EV

We frequently get this question, but the answer isn’t anywhere in the official paperwork and is never explained except in this type of conversation. In great part that came out of the fact that we don’t use the name of the family. Since the beginning, the family very deliberately took a step back from the identity of the collection and the organization.

AK

That’s really interesting. You mentioned the staff size and the number of people involved in the curatorial aspects of KADIST. How does that function for you?

MM

We support curators’ and artists’ projects, as a team. We’re all involved in the curatorial developments of the program. It’s something we’ve discussed a lot in San Francisco, and similar to the way our Paris team works, there’s not necessarily a distinction between curatorial, production, and communication. Since we’re always working with the artists or curators in residence, there’s always some kind of curatorial discussion happening. Of course, when we work with an invited curator, they sign the exhibition, but there’s still dialogue and feedback. It’s a collective artistic approach to curating that does not employ the usual categories.

EV

Everyone on the team is trained as a curator, but no one has “curator” in their job title. But it’s a deliberate choice not to make it too explicit. We never announce that the solo shows are curated by me or by the staff. I don’t know if anyone pays much attention to that fact, but it’s a little bit unusual. Within our local programs, we have shows that are more specifically curated by team members, and that fingerprint can be more or less visible.

MM

We also collaborate with curators for our international projects. Some of those are part of a series we started two years ago, which is framed within regional research. We invite curators with expertise in a certain region in the world to propose a three-year project that’s supported by either of our two offices. The curator chooses the city and institutions they want to work with, they co-commission three artists with partner institutions, and then there’s an exhibition. It’s really a reflection of the region itself.

AK

What would be a specific example?

EV

We are currently working on a project where we invited a curator from Slovenia, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, who’s been based in Paris for a long time and knows KADIST very well, to make a proposal around the question of the European region, which is a huge topic but also a way of bringing her own subjective reading of a region and its dynamics—historically and currently, politically, et cetera—into it. She commissioned three artists. The first artist, Lala Raščić, was co-commissioned with the Lumbardhi Foundation, a cultural institution in Kosovo, which is the youngest state in the Balkans and not even recognized as an independent state by some of its neighbors. The second commission is a project with Daniela Ortiz, which we co-commissioned with the art center Netwerk in Aalst, just outside of Brussels, which is considered a center of Europe Belgium is a very torn country in terms of identity and struggles. And then the third exhibition is a project with Kunsthalle Lissabon and Hangar, two Lisbon institutions with whom we’re co-commissioning a work by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri. And so, by the end of this journey we’ll have done seminars in three European countries, commissioned three works, and presented an exhibition to render this research and the different dynamics. The final exhibition in this case takes place next year at Kunstverein in Hamburg.

AK

Amazing.

EV

Marie is following another project in Asia with Hyunjin Kim. This format allows us to stretch the time of this collaboration with the curator and to work somewhat differently with the artists as well.

AK

What you speak to is precisely a key question we’re asking in this project. I think, so often, organizations are regimented according to how they think they need to be organized. I’m so interested in this dispersion of place, and displacement. What does it take to make the organization—is it the location that you’re in? Or is it an ethos? It’s interesting to hear you articulate that it can be in multiple places, over multiple time frames, with multiple participants.

EV

That’s a very good way to put it. Again, we have deliberately stayed small so that we can multiply this kind of initiative. It’s very challenging at the same time, because you’re working with contacts and you really have to get to know the person. You have to find institutions with real alignment with the way you’re working. But it’s nourishing as well on all sides. For the cases when we do travel works from the collection, it’s so interesting for us to see how they take on new meanings, how they translate in other contexts. That’s what Marie was saying in the beginning about cultural dialogue.

MM

Collaboration is central to everything we have been doing since the beginning. Relationships and collaboration characterize KADIST more than its location.

TN

That’s such a wonderful way to put it. There’s something very mobile about KADIST. You’re making things possible between different cultures and different communities. So, then, how would you characterize your audience? Do the same kinds of folks attend your exhibitions in Paris versus San Francisco? Because your collaborations necessarily, I would think, build different communities. Are you always developing new audiences?

MM

I think all of our programs have different audiences—locally, internationally, online also. It ranges from a very tight-knit network of art professionals to larger publics depending on the collaborations and the institutions we collaborate with.

EV

In terms of the local audience, it’s very clear that we each have a recurring, close crowd made up of, as Marie said, art professionals, art students, artists. It’s always been a very international crowd as well. We always have people who are passing through Paris come by for a visit, or artists who are in the city doing a residency who come by, in great part because we’re one of the rare places in Paris that does English-speaking events. We have this identity here that is not completely French, which is an asset because it draws an international crowd.

At the same time, some people have a hard time understanding who we are—even the French audience. For each project, we also try to attract a community that’s specific to the content of the project itself. But that’s with the small means, time, and staff that we have. Ideally, we’d like to open up to a wider audience, and that’s what we’re trying to do with everything we have online. Since early on, we have been very active in producing online content—video interviews of the artist residencies, curated programs on social media—so that we could maintain a relationship to audiences in other countries where we had done projects, or places where we were planning to do projects. It’s allowed us to keep connecting with more international audiences, and so far, it’s been working quite well.

MM

The philosophy of KADIST is to try to make the work as accessible as possible to our audiences within our means and scale. For instance, we just started a video library that allows streaming access to most of the videos in the collection. Our physical galleries attract an already-initiated public–you could say—and our online activities reach a broader audience who doesn’t have such ready access to art.

AK

You mentioned accessibility, and I’m wondering how that functions for the institution, given the politically minded aspects of your program. This can be about reaching the broadest audience possible, but also thinking about who enters the dialogue, who is presented and how, who has access and how—as a way of thinking about ability perspectives to representational politics. How does that figure into your institutional structure?

MM

We think about these questions, and have conversations about them, every day. We’re trying to be mindful that the program, the people we invite and have conversations with, are as broad as possible. It’s part of the reason why we’re going to two exhibitions next year—to create the time to think through those questions. But these discussions manifest in myriad forms. In December 2018, for instance, we co-organized an event in our space in San Francisco, The Collected Schizophrenias, with Triple Canopy, Esmé Weijun Wang and Corrine Fitzpatrick, which was retransmitted via a live feed.

EV

Representational politics function differently in the US context versus Europe. I think because our program has always been very international and driven by the artists, who come from very different contexts, diversity has always been baked into the institution. This has created a kind of precedent, or reflexes, in representing different types of communities, different scenes, striving for balance in terms of geography, which has always been a concern for us. The program itself has de facto always been very diverse. And you see that in the audience: different artists, projects and topics naturally bring different audiences. Which doesn’t mean that we no longer have to think about it. We keep the questions in play.

AK

We ask this question because different organizations are thinking about these questions in different ways. In the United States we’re having a lot of conversations about who works in institutions, who’s on our boards, and how that reflects our exhibition strategies. And this is race, gender, sexuality, and accessibility from ability perspectives. We’re thinking about the multifaceted nature of those questions and how they figure into the organization on the non-public side of things. A lot of organizations like to talk about their politics, but it’s sometimes quite marginal to how these are enacted or infused into the structure of things.

To return to your hubs, we’re curious how you’re thinking about KADIST in regard to your local ecologies. We’ve talked quite a lot about your international scope and dispersed presence, but you do have two physical hubs. Perhaps you can tell us something about what those are, and what a visitor might experience, and how you each see yourself in relation to the local ecology of arts institutions.

EV

When we opened the space in Paris a little more than ten years ago, it was a moment when the contemporary art scene in France was somewhat closed in on itself. We perceived a need to reopen, bring in more air, more conversation. There are cycles in local scenes where spaces close and open, and it changes the ecology and the dynamics, and in that moment, we were part of a new generation of art spaces and commercial galleries that were bringing in new international artists and creating a new feeling in the city. I’ve seen a clear evolution over the past ten years. Paris is back on the map, and it’s due to many different things, such as the art fairs being more attractive. We certainly didn’t do it single-handedly, but I think people identify KADIST in Paris as part of this internationalizing dynamic. As I was saying earlier, a lot of our programs are in English. The French are very attached to the French language, so it was unusual to have this bilingual communication. It was a bit out of the blue. I think we still occupy that place, but we’re less alone. We’ve been around a little longer, so we have become more institutional in a way.

MM

The San Francisco art scene is closed in on itself in a similar way that Paris was when KADIST started despite, or perhaps due to, its location in Silicon Valley. KADIST brings international artists and speakers for events and exhibitions, as do the CCA Wattis Institute and SFMOMA, among others, but they work on different scales than we do. Very few other spaces have an international program, and most nonprofits and small galleries present works by local or US artists.

AK

Can you describe the physical spaces? Do you charge admission? Is there always an exhibition on view?

EV

No, we don’t charge—it’s all free. It’s the same in both places. It’s open four afternoons per week. Our office spaces are separated from the gallery spaces. We also show the exhibitions by appointment, but we have fixed days when the space is always open; for Paris, it’s Thursday through Sunday; in San Francisco it’s Wednesday through Saturday.

When a visitor enters the space, they’ll always encounter a KADIST person who often followed the production of the artist and curator from the start. It can be a member of staff, or an intern from the project team. We even created a title for the position, the Production and Mediation Manager. “Mediation” in French doesn’t mean the same thing as in English, but this person is in charge of the audience. They figure out how to deliver to the audience so that there is direct continuity from the makers to the viewer. We’re a small team and everyone has multiple roles. It really makes no sense to have a kind of gap between the project and how it is communicated to visitors. When you enter the space, if you want someone to give you a tour, it will cover how the project came about and how it was experienced in the city, space, or neighborhood, more than the symbolic or metaphorical meaning of the artwork.

MM

Our San Francisco space is located at a street intersection that has quite a lot of traffic, and we have big storefront windows, so people are coming in all the time. We have social hours with drinks before and after events, and that’s all for free. We’re also thinking of the mediation, but we still haven’t found a proper word for it in English!

AK

What kinds of neighborhoods are you located in?

MM

KADIST San Francisco is in the Mission District. There are two other nonprofits, Southern Exposure and The David Ireland House, on the same street as us, as well as small new companies and lots of restaurants and cafés. It’s not near the museums, which are located downtown. Our immediate neighborhood is more residential than commercial, but it’s shifting a lot with gentrification and increasing costs of living.

EV

In Paris, we also have a gallery on street level with a large storefront window that immediately offers a view onto the exhibition. We play a lot with the interaction with the street. This is part of the dramaturgy. We’re situated in Montmartre, which is a very touristy area. Even if you’ve never been to Paris, you’ve heard of it. It was not so deliberate, though: there was an available building at the time, and we decided to establish the gallery and office there. As in San Francisco, it’s not in the center where all the major museums are. We have a few gallery neighbors not so far away, but there is no concentration there in terms of contemporary art. So, people have to make an effort to come, and when they do, they tend to stay a little longer. Quite often we are showing long video works, and people are willing to linger and spend some time because they are not bouncing from one space to another, trying to see ten shows in one afternoon. We could have moved at some point to a denser neighborhood, but we decided it was interesting to continue with this situation.

I don’t think our neighborhood represents typical Paris. It’s at the juncture of Sacré-Coeur, where the streets are flooded with tourists, and a much calmer area that is very gentrified. Many members of the cinema community live around here, and a high concentration of older people who have been here for decades. And close by are Château Rouge, Château d’Eau, Barbès, which are neighborhoods of the African diaspora, with African hairdressers and markets. Paris is a very walkable city, and we’re in the heart of it and its multiple identities.

TN

Which institutions would you consider your peers? This could be conceptual, or in terms of people—either artists or curators—who are practicing right now, or in a historical sense. In whatever way, with whom do you share a kind of mission or ethos?

MM

Maybe you can tell us.

EV

It’s a cheeky question.

MM

It’s a cheeky question because KADIST is so intrinsically hybrid. But some institutions share common values and work at similar scales, such as Para Site in Hong Kong whose director, Cosmin Costinas, was actually one of our first residents.

EV

I was thinking of KHOJ, which you mentioned earlier. It has a very different history, a unique story, but it has a dynamic between an international program and a local project. Another program we’ve worked with in India is Clark House Initiative, an artist-run space that has become an international institution. Our work with them was really very experimental. In terms of larger institutions, last year we collaborated with V-A-C Foundation in Moscow. They have a space in Venice, and they’ll be opening a very large museum in Moscow next year. They’ve developed a collection and program that are not connected, so that’s different from us, but they’ve been very close to the emerging Russian art scene and support a lot of artists that we’ve also followed closely. Many are artists with strong political positions, which is not always easy in the context of Russia.

MM

I’d like to ask you the same question: Who do you think our peers are?

TN

KHOJ, certainly. I knew that you worked with them, but I also know that they have different programmatic elements—residencies, but also an “art and ecology” focus, and an “art and science” focus. They also are a very small team—I think there’s only three people there.

AK

We should touch on how funding works in your institution—how your projects are funded, and how you pay or otherwise support artists.

EV

In terms of our resources, once again, there are two structures that work similarly with an endowment fund. We have autonomy, but it’s framed within a certain budget, so we do a bit of extra fundraising for projects. That’s why the word “foundation” is a bit ambiguous.

MM

In the United States, foundations give grants, which we don’t necessarily do.

EV

Yes, we’re not a foundation that supports other entities’ projects. We are paying for our projects ourselves. So sometimes we co-commission projects, or co-curate, or collaborate with other institutions so as to share resources.

AK

Do the funds come from the family, or is your program supported by a mix of publicly sourced grants and private funds?

EV

So far, it’s privately funded.

AK

That creates a certain amount of freedom: you’re not out fundraising to make your projects happen because you have a core infrastructure.

MM

Definitely. It gives us a solid base even if we also need to fundraise for our programs. We’re also transitioning toward figuring out the budget for the longer term. KADIST is still a very young institution. It’s grown in ambition, but not necessarily financially.

AK

And that leads to my next question: How does scale relate to what you do and how you are thinking about the future? What does growth look like for your institution? Does the long-term plan for KADIST rely on any core group of people?

EV

The last several years have involved a lot of changes to KADIST, such as going from one venue to two venues and starting the international projects. For the last two years, we’ve been focused on trying to balance the local and the international programs, in terms of programs, bandwidth and resources. We’re thinking about the future, how to develop more international projects, how to build our international audience via our online presence.

MM

As an example, we recently started working with Guangzhou-based curator and artist Ruijun Shen, who is now KADIST Director of China Programs. She guides our programs and partnerships in China where we don’t have a physical space. Since very early on, we’ve worked with curators, artists, and partners in China and working with someone located in the context was one way to deepen our engagement in the region. Maybe, who knows, it is a network model that KADIST will evolve toward.

AK

I’m interested in how institutions think of themselves in relation to our current political situation, in terms of class conflict and environmental conflict. Thinking about the political urgency that you’ve expressed in your mission and with regard to how you see KADIST moving forward, what are you most excited about in terms of the role it could play in this context?

EV

We’re having a lot of discussions about how to perform a word in our mission statement: “relevance.”

AK

That’s wonderful.

EV

It’s a way, we found recently, to conceptualize the connection between art and political issues and the questions we were addressing earlier. This question of relevance is something we’re trying to encapsulate and perform. It’s a bit early to offer specifics, but we’re working on that in the long term, figuring out how to create projects in relation to larger mass media perhaps, or other types of channels. It’s something very dear to us and the artists we’re working with.