Larys Frogier is the Director of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai. As curator, critic and art historian, he is involved in artistic and social challenges in post-global contexts where ongoing social, economical, cultural transformations demand new ways of interrelations, citizenship and reinvented creativity. 

He curated numerous exhibitions and published extensive essays on the works of international artists: Adel Abdessemed, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Philippe Parreno, Paola Pivi, Ugo Rondinone, Wang Du, Yang Jiecang.
Previously the Director of the contemporary art centre La Criée in Rennes (France), he curated long-term projects (symposiums, residencies, exhibitions, publications) which question the links and ruptures between broadening transcontinental areas. Chair of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART jury since 2013 at the Rockbund Art Museum, he is conceiving this new award, exhibition and research program as an evolving platform to promote emerging artists and to question Asia as a construction to investigate rather than a monolithic area or fixed identities.

Larys Frogier taught art theory, history of art and curatorial studies at the University of Rennes, while he was also researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and at the Archives for Art Criticism.

11.19 A Museum As A Boat

In a context of global change for the art industries, considering the new frameworks for supporting and making visible artists projects out of the institutional format, going beyond the parameters of local and international art market, it is decisive to re-question how a Museum can carefully develop and contribute to the development of the curatorial practices.

My presentation will highlight the importance of a curatorial practice for conceiving and cultivating a Museum's "vision": in order to avoid flat and formatted global Museums industries, the vision is here considered as an ongoing process of building "constructive contradictions", revisiting the making of the image, risking fruitful intuitions as well as critical knowledge, considering but also extending localities. It is then a challenging mission for a Museum to support artists' projects by creating different, paradoxical and unexpected format of exhibitions, and to offer to the audience a full, sincere and autonomous experience for the art.

In a context of massive cultural and media consumption, it is maybe by taking care of the small, the friendship, the unstable, the necessary displacement that Museums will achieve its mission of considering cultural production as a real and precious collective act of contributions, from the artists to the curators to the audience.