Category: Museum Director
Nationality: German
Last Year: NEW

There are few bees more busy than Biesenbach. This past year, the director of MoMA PS1 and chief curator at large of MoMA concentrated as much of his attention outside New York as he did on his two institutions (where he squeezed in a retrospective of Francis Alÿs and a survey of Laurel Nakadate’s recent film and photographic practice). Biesenbach served in an advisory role alongside Christine Macel and Hans Ulrich Obrist for Based in Berlin, a six-week exhibition of – guess what? – Berlin-based artists. (Biesenbach’s ties to that city are strong: he is founding director of both Kunst-Werke and the Berlin Biennale.) At the Manchester International Festival in July he teamed up with Obrist again to stage 11 Rooms, an installation of durational performance works by the likes of Marina Abramovic, Tino Sehgal and Simon Fujiwara. And his most significant project to date, Abramovic’s soon-to-be-renamed The Artist Is Ever-Present, is currently being restaged at Dasha Zhukova’s Garage in Moscow.