‘A Portal to Possibilities’: Hans Ulrich Obrist on his New Memoir

Andrew Durbin The first chapter of your latest book, Life in Progress [2025], hinges on an accident from when you were six – you were struck by a car. I read this as kind of second birth for you.

Hans Ulrich Obrist The accident triggered a feeling of urgency – it was a near-death experience, which affected me for many months as I recovered in hospital. After that, there was no time to lose. You must make every day great, I realized, and every day something has to happen – you can’t wait for tomorrow. This was also the moment when my obsession with books began. So yes, it was a very big change.

AD So much of the charm of the book is in your first encounters with artists: Alighiero Boetti, Christian Boltanski, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Annette Messager, among many others. I’d love to know about your process of reconstructing those early moments.

HUO I wrote much of the book during the COVID-19 lockdowns. It never would have happened without Bernard Comment, my publisher at Éditions du Seuil, who originally commissioned it. He called me every day and said, ‘You have to write.’ From the beginning, I wanted this to be a more personal book; I had already written lots of books about specific artists, and about curating and curatorial history. So I went back to some notebooks and began to think about how art came to me as someone who didn’t grow up in a household where my parents took me to museums; we didn’t have a single art catalogue at home. As I was writing, I realized the multiple ways that art had reached me through unexpected channels, whether it was the street art of Harald Naegeli or seeing Hans Krüsi – a farmhand who has become well-known for his art brut – selling flowers, or the drawings of healer Emma Kunz on the packaging of her AION A medicine, or Claude Sandoz, who illustrated the cover of the railway timetable booklet – one of the most important books in my life, which I used to plot all these imaginary journeys.

The book is about art being a portal to possibilities, new experiments in art and technology. Hans Ulrich Obrist

AD Another early encounter was with the legacy of Aby Warburg. You mention passing this ‘haunted house’ on your way to high school, and it turns out to have belonged to [the psychiatrist] Ludwig Binswanger, who treated Warburg. I love your description of your discovery of Warburg through this haunted house; how you grasped the importance of his work before you fully understood its scope.

HUO It was serendipitous. Walking from the railway station to school [in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland], I would see this abandoned house in a park. One day, I asked my teacher whose house it was, and he explained that it was the famous clinic of Dr. Ludwig Binswanger, a pupil of Sigmund Freud and the subject of Michel Foucault’s early essay ‘Dream, Imagination, and Existence’ [1954]. My teacher explained to me that Warburg delivered his 1923 lecture on the Hopi serpent ritual there. I eventually became fascinated by Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas [1927–29], not fully understanding, as a teenager, what it meant, but I recognized that he had created a constellation of images. Based on that, I started to buy postcards of artworks and began to make my own atlas, mounting these postcards on big cardboard panels on the wall. Later, I built cardboard boxes and started to curate postcard exhibitions in them. So, in a way, I became a curator because of Aby Warburg.

AD Towards the end of the book, you reflect on the loss of your mother, as well as the poet and painter Etel Adnan and the writer and theorist Édouard Glissant. Many of the key figures in your development as a curator and thinker have died by the end of the book. For me, the memoir partly doubles as an elegy for an analogue art world of letters, postcards and serendipitous encounters on the street.

HUO In a way, that’s true. Yet, at the same time, I hope the book is also about the future being invented with fragments from the past. Another message is that we need artists in the world. We need artists in the spaces where it’s expected, but also where it’s unexpected; we need artists at the table where decisions are made, to bring art into society. The book is about art being a portal to possibilities, new experiments in art and technology. It’s also about spaces where cultures and disciplines of all kinds can be brought into contact with each other.

AD I do want to push you on this. You end the book reflecting on a case study of artists using AI. Many of the artists you most admire would be pretty suspicious of a tool like this, I imagine, and so I’m curious how you reconcile your artist-forward approach with your fascination with a tool that’s constantly threatening to eat up and even destroy their work.

HUO I wanted to end the book on this case study of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s exhibition ‘The Call’ [2024] at Serpentine, because I felt it showed how artists can engage critically with, but also have an impact on, how technology develops. Holly and Mat focused on the creation of new vocal datasets and training polyphonic AI models as art-making. The artists approached AI as a coordination technology like group singing, reflecting how we can use technology to enable structures for gathering. The project, which involved choral ensembles from around the UK, was discussed in Brussels and Westminster as a responsible and ethical use of AI. But the book also ends rather abruptly, with more to come, similarly to Werner Herzog’s memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All [2023]. I loved how Herzog’s book ends in the middle of a sentence.

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Life in Progress is published by Allen Lane

^{Main image: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Life in Progress (detail), 2025, book cover. Courtesy: Allen Lane}