[00:00:01] Nicolas de Oliveira: So the combination between art and space led us quite neatly to this discovery of what, back in the 1980s was a very unexplored term, namely installation art.

[00:00:13] Nicola Oxley: we thought, we are not familiar with this space. But we are familiar with space.

[00:00:19] Nicolas de Oliveira: The galleries that we approached for slides, in those days, they'd say, no, no, no, this is all sculpture, alright? And we'd go, no, it isn't! This is something else. So this seems real anathema when you think about it from today

[00:00:32] because it's just so obvious. Back then, not at all. And the other thing that was really interesting was that rare was the gallery or the space or the artist that documented the work.

[00:00:44] Nicola Oxley: There is a kind of feeling nowadays that there's all these different compartments, curators are one compartment, administrators of museums are others, but where is the artist in that process?

[00:00:56] Museums and sometimes big commercial galleries, they want artists to perform. Perhaps they've forgotten that they also need a huge amount of help and support.

[00:01:08] Nicolas de Oliveira: We are now in a position where we can say with some confidence that unless there's an artwork that has a strong presence, then it's not installation art at all. It's something else. It's a branch of the entertainment industry.

[00:01:32] Welcome to the Installation Art podcast, the world's number one and only podcast about installation art and the people who work with it.

[00:01:41] In this show, you will hear about the joys and challenges of the medium and get an exclusive behind the scenes look at the career and process of internationally renowned guests.

[00:01:53] I am your host, Anastasia Parmson.

[00:01:56] Today's episode is a little different. I have set aside my usual set of questions to follow the lead of guests who have had an enormous influence on how installation art is written about, curated and understood.

[00:02:10] Joining me is Nicolas de Oliveira, and a bit later also Nicola Oxley. The legendary duo known to friends and colleagues as Nico and Nici. They are curators, writers and thinkers who literally wrote the book on installation art. Several books, in fact, which have become foundational texts in the field.

[00:02:34] As soon as I heard about them from a previous guest, the brilliant Hans op de Beeck, I tracked down their books and even used them as a reference in episode 25, when unpacking what is installation art.

[00:02:48] Nicola almost wasn't gonna join us today because of bout of flu, but luckily she did join a little later in the conversation.

[00:02:56] We talked about their work process, the role of curators in installation, art, the place of installation art in the contemporary art market, and so much more. So let's jump right in.

[00:03:10] Here is my conversation with Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley.

[00:03:13] Anastasia: thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk on the Installation Art podcast. It's a huge honor to have you,

[00:03:21] Nicolas de Oliveira: My pleasure entirely.

[00:03:22] Anastasia: I'm sorry to hear Nicola isn't feeling well

[00:03:26] Nicolas de Oliveira: Yeah. It's, it's kind of sad, but she very much wanted to be part of it, but she's just, she's just coughing and spluttering. It would not make for a proper broadcast.

[00:03:36] Anastasia: next time maybe.

[00:03:38] Nicolas de Oliveira: Indeed.

[00:03:39] Anastasia: Let's start by tell me about where have you come from, and how did you discover contemporary art for yourself?

[00:03:49] Nicolas de Oliveira: I grew up in Portugal.

[00:03:51] Anastasia: Wow.

[00:03:51] Nicolas de Oliveira: my parents are Portuguese and German. So my connection with England comes much later and I ended up studying architecture in London, which is how I came to be in this country. Not intending to stay longer than the study period, but as these things often happen, I ended up staying and met Nicola and Nicola Oxley is my life partner, wife.

[00:04:22] And we've always had the contemporary art connection between ourselves. So her background was as a fine artist studying at Goldsmiths in the sort of important period of, of post conceptual art. And in my case was looking at architecture and looking at space. So the combination, I guess between the two, between art and space led us, I think, quite neatly to this discovery of what, at that time, back in the 1980s was a very unexplored term, namely installation art.

[00:05:00] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. Very interesting. So what was installation art like and like who made it, who talked about it back in those days?

[00:05:11] Nicolas de Oliveira: I think we were chroniclers, I guess as we were making books. But also prior to that we were producers. And I think this is often the case with who are at the sort of vanguard of stuff. not just looking at their peers and certainly they're not looking at history for inspiration looking forward, but they're actually looking at what can I do? And that's what I mean by you become a producer almost by default, because you have a nose that something might be out there, you don't quite know what it is, but you're willing to explore it. And in that sense, of course, the legacy was very much American and European, particularly, New York artists who were instrumental in terms of, you know, the sort of historical early aspects of environments and sculptures. And at the same time also Arte Povera in Italy was massively influential. Meanwhile, also Yves Klein, a sort of monumental French artist who was doing performances and was doing proto installations. I mean, a lot of people were doing things they but weren't naming as such, installation art. They were naming them all sorts of other things, interventions, environments, happenings, Allan Kaprow's famous happenings, for example,

[00:06:40] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:06:41] Nicolas de Oliveira: which were, I guess part theater, part conceptual art. Dan Graham's performances of describing how his body was feeling, standing on one leg in front of an audience. They're just fascinating documents. The great thing is that nowadays you can look at those things online, these sort of scratchy black and white videos, and you go, oh, I wonder what that was like to be there.

[00:07:03] But in fact, when you're asking me what was it like in the eighties, I guess for your generation, it's another one of those moments where you kind of think that that must have been a sort of pioneering time. For us, that was just quite normal. But that's always the experience of a person who's producing stuff or witnessing stuff in a certain moment.

[00:07:26] It seems really normal. Seen from a distance through other eyes, through your viewers, listeners and so on and so forth, it seems extraordinary, but it was perfectly normal. I can guarantee you.

[00:07:37] Anastasia: Right. So when you say you were producers, that means you were making installation art at the time?

[00:07:45] Nicolas de Oliveira: Well, Nicola was definitely making installation art as an artist. She cast a complete floor of a space in plaster when she was at Goldsmith's in the gallery. And the idea was for people to walk on the thing and destroy the piece. And that was really early. And this was way before artists like Rachel Whiteread and so on and so forth were casting things in plaster. But I guess that, again, Bruce Nauman beat everybody to it anyway. So it's not like plaster has a kind of copyright on it, rather it's a sort of material that people were messing with. And she certainly made a really beautiful piece out of that. So her background was very much in terms of making those types of works. But I think that when you are looking at other artists, and I think this was the key for us, we weren't looking at exhibitions, curatorial projects, museums, galleries. We were looking at what artists were making. And I think this was particularly to do with smaller galleries, project spaces and so on, which were beginning to emerge in London in the early 1980s. And I think that was a, a really seminal moment. And London was an interesting place at that period for production. And production particularly I think because it wasn't necessarily a place to sell work, rather it was a place to produce work. I think that was a real distinction in terms of the market.

[00:09:21] The market catches up to installation art in a completely different way later on, but that's, that's another story which We can kind of go into.

[00:09:28] Anastasia: We can come back to this.

[00:09:30] Nicolas de Oliveira: absolutely. But, but, but certainly there was a kind of vibe there in terms of people making stuff. And we, as producers started our first gallery, which is called Unit 7 Gallery back in 1986, which we ran for four and a half years, in an old luggage factory. And that was the kind of space that was happening, I think, in London, but also in America, in New York, on the West Coast and select few other places where I think artists mainly were flexing their muscles to try and see what could happen, but also I think in terms of exploring this key relationship between space and art and the audience.

[00:10:17] Now, clearly, this is something in terms of sculpture had been mined a little bit by minimal artists in the late sixties and uh, and early seventies, and yet something kind of kicked off that was slightly different when installation art came on.

[00:10:34] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. So how did you then move into the curating and writing side of your work?

[00:10:43] Nicolas de Oliveira: At that particular period, publication I guess printing very expensive, was tricky. So everything we did was about not bringing in stuff that existed, but essentially commissioning artists to make new works, single artists. And similarly, when it came to documentation, one of the things that I think it was, especially Nicola, realized straight from the off to have good documentation of the exhibitions, given that these are all perishable pieces, where the materials afterwards would end up in a skip and the event essentially will be up for a month or six weeks or whatever, and never to be seen again.

[00:11:26] And that was the vibe at that time. It's very, very different the way that this functions today with large warehouses and certificates and so on. Then it was just about production. So documentation was the flip side of the production. Without the production, and lots of artists would say, oh, I'm just doing it, I just want to have it in the ether and never to be seen again. And this kind of anti-market, anti-this, anti that. And we thought, hold on a second. There is going to be a story of this. There is going to be a history of this. And I think time proved us right.

[00:12:01] And the one investment we made while we had this big warehouse space was to invest in a good photographer. And the photographer taught us so much. A guy called Edward Woodman who was a photographer mainly of 3D works at the time. And he would come into the space and say, there's three or four shots in this. Let me demonstrate to you. And he'd arrive with his Hasselblad and you just be perched over the top of this.

[00:12:27] And he'd show you, you see there's really only these shots. And we'd go, Hey, come on. But what about the jazzy shots to make things look good and interesting. And he'd argue, do you want have things recorded as documents or do you want flashy photographs? And we said, of course, you know, the documents is much, much more important.

[00:12:49] And in fact, once again, history sort of bore him out. And we learned a great deal from him. And he was actually one of our first sponsors because he said, you'll just pay for the film and for the developing, but my time, I gift you because I think this is a really, really interesting project. So you rubbed along together with someone like that.

[00:13:08] That in turn led actually quite directly to publishing. We knew he'd been doing a lot of photographs of, at that time in London and elsewhere, people like seminal artists or who became seminal artists like Helen Chadwick, for example, Ed Ellington, lots of others. And he had been doing the photographs of a lot of their installations in off spaces, small galleries and such. So he'd made a name for himself and we then approached Thames & Hudson with another partner to try and put together a book on installation art because we realized that there wasn't such a book.

[00:13:53] As a result, Installation Art, the first book came out in 1994, but in fact it was in the works four years earlier. And it took Thames & Hudson, who were at the time, the sort of biggest publisher. They're still a very big publisher, could actually sell this. Because simply the, uh, the people at the book fairs didn't believe that there was such a thing as installation art that was going to be of any great import.

[00:14:22] And similarly, in terms of books, the galleries that we approached for slides, in those days, there were of course slides and sometimes they'd send us these amazing big transparencies from New York galleries and you'd think it was Christmas. And they'd say, no, no, no, this is all sculpture, alright? And we'd go, no, it isn't! I mean, this is something else. So this seems real anathema when you think about it from today because it's just so obvious. Back then, not at all. And the other thing that was really interesting was that rare was the gallery or the space or the artist that documented the work. And so therefore, when we were casting around for images for our first book, it was a really tricky one because a lot of people had photographs of the private view, for example, with lots of people milling around drinking. And we'd go, where's the photographs? And I remember this with the ICA in London, for instance, a very important kind of production space, And they'd say we didn't take any photographs of the exhibition because we didn't think it was important. And you

[00:15:26] Anastasia: Wow.

[00:15:27] Nicolas de Oliveira: I mean, nowadays you'd think you're nuts.

[00:15:29] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:15:30] Nicolas de Oliveira: in a sense, in, in a roundabout way, that's how we got into making books and publishing because you realized that there was a niche in the market that needed filling. And that was specifically to do with a certain kind of book, the installation art books of which there are two with 10 years apart, where the first one kind of mines the arrival of installation art and site specificity in particular. And the second one focuses to a much greater extent on the idea of interaction and the audience and the way that the audience becomes a kind of co-producer of the work.

[00:16:09] And certainly introduces these aspects of immersion. And one of the terms that we kind of pioneered in that book very strongly, and that was in 2003, was this whole idea of immersion. And immersion is of course something that nowadays, you know, we're completely inured to. 'Cause you just go, Hey, come on, immersion has been there since the dawn of time. And we can tell you, well it wasn't.

[00:16:31] Anastasia: Yeah. Well, it's amazing to hear that you even had to convince galleries that what they were showing was in fact installation art and not just sculpture.

[00:16:43] Nicolas de Oliveira: Yep. I mean, commercial galleries in those days, I think maybe also, especially in Britain, were quite conservative. And a lot of the experimentation was happening much more in offsites, artist run spaces. And also a few organizations that were a little bit more forward looking. That were things like, you know, the Whitechapel Gallery, the ICA, the Camden Art Center, those types of spaces were much more in the vanguard.

[00:17:15] And those are publicly funded spaces rather than private spaces. I think things have changed a great deal in the intervening years in that, I mean, Nici and I have also worked quite extensively with, with private collections especially and we're doing books on private collections and what have you. But I think a lot of experimentation today is actually being paid for by the private sector. Why? the private sector has realized that there's actually serious money to be made uh, with the avant-garde, at the coalface where stuff is happening. And after all, we live in an age of influencers.

[00:17:55] So I need to tell you nothing about this.

[00:17:57] Anastasia: Hmm. Well speaking of spaces tell me a bit about Museum of Installation.

[00:18:04] Nicolas de Oliveira: Museum of Installation was the brainchild of Nici and I together with a third partner. And, we were directing it and he was the financial director. And then everything kind of um, shifted a little bit around, but uh, we started this off as an idea of having an institution that wasn't an institution.

[00:18:27] It was a kind of counter institution. Maybe a little bit like in places like New York, the New museum, that sort of thing. Which of course became a proper institution, but it started very much from an artist space. And we wanted to give real credence to this idea of installation art as a force. And in 1990, essentially we started this thing and it ran for, I mean, as a, as a going space until 2003, 2004. So quite a long time. And we shifted buildings during that period. The idea was to work initially on the first site in um, uptown, in the center of town to work with single artists. And the idea was to commission and build together as a team of people new works with the artists that we'd commissioned. So a new work would be produced each time. And so we were doing five- six shows each year with proper build time in between. And the idea was to give artists a little bit of duration and a lot of help because there were several of us, we worked with a lot of volunteers. Nicola was running a department in a university of fine art. so we could rely on having hands to help and people to inspire and people to help also with technical aspects. We also had of people who were working in things like special effects and other workshops of that kind. And when suddenly something was going completely wrong, you'd get on the phone, you'd say help!

[00:20:07] And I think the word help has been a constant in all of our endeavors, because you never know everything. You become fairly good at building stuff, problem solving, fundraising, all of those sorts of things. But the word help means that you know that there's a constellation of other people around you. I wouldn't call it a network. I think networks are something else. They're much more kind of mercenary, much more transactional. In our case, it was a bunch of friendships really. And I think lots of artists will be able to attest to that, that those friendship groups actually really drive things. And in fact, sustain. Sustainability is the sort of key thing that people talk about today.

[00:20:49] And sustainability of like, oh, we've been here for a year, you think, Hmm. Next year we're coming up to 40 years of making spaces. And making spaces on absolute shoestring budgets. How does that happen? Well, it happens because a bunch of people decide that this is worth doing. And that doesn't mean to say that your ambitions are any, the less. Your ambitions are the same as the big galleries, the museums the really interesting spaces worldwide. But you need to work with other people to make those things happen.

[00:21:23] Anastasia: Yeah, sounds like something that is really needed all around the world, like iterations of Museum of Installation. We definitely need one in Australia, I think. Are you currently running any kind of exhibition spaces?

[00:21:42] Nicolas de Oliveira: Yeah. After museum installation ceased as a, as a working space, we started another organization and this led to the gallery that we currently run, which is SE8 Gallery. And during the period of Museum of Installation, we also always did lots of outside sites. Outside sites are simply a description of saying: we have our base site in which we do exhibitions. At one stage we had a building with several small floors in which we were working not on single exhibitions, but you know, three or four artists at the same time or five or six. So that really opened up the exposure to a much larger extent. We always worked very, very internationally. And then we had sites that opened and closed temporarily in different places. So one moment we'd have a show on of Phyllida Barlow at the main site, for example, who's a really important British sculptor. And at the same time we'd have Terry Smith working with us in a room, a giant room, in fact, that was gifted to us at the British Museum. And then three months later, we'd be doing something at the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale where we'd get invited to curate a single project in a church.

[00:23:05] Anastasia: Hmm.

[00:23:05] Nicolas de Oliveira: So those were the kind of offsites that we were using. And they would pop and off depending on what was available. And availability of spaces, I think was very different then from what it is now.

[00:23:17] Anastasia: In what way?

[00:23:18] Nicolas de Oliveira: young artists, I think, often talk today about spaces not being available. And a lot of that is to do with real estate, of course.

[00:23:26] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:23:27] Nicolas de Oliveira: And the stories that we can tell from London are echoed, I think in New York, are echoed certainly in Berlin for example, but several decades ago. So for example, we worked in Berlin a number of times. And in Berlin after the fall of the wall, in the late eighties and then in the early nineties, there was suddenly lots of space available.

[00:23:50] And this led to really interesting projects starting. Some of those projects became mainstream spaces like KW, Kunst-Werke for example, the celebrated kind of civic space in Mitte, in Berlin. But that whole area was kind of almost razed to the ground, and it was just a bunch of shells, and they refurbished them. Why? Because it was cheap. People were casting around, people were excited about new things happening. And so one thing led to another. Obviously the developers moved in in time because they got quicker and quicker at catching up. In London, for example. The areas that we were in around east end was a completely wasteland when you looked at the footage from the 1980s. I mean, it's beautiful and really interesting and really gnarly in a sense, really rough. We like that sort of thing. I think it's very conducive for artists and warehouses and all this production really. But it's not where the money would go. The money came later. And nowadays, I mean, of course, this is the legacy of stuff that happened in the 1990s. People would do big installation shows and where would they do them? Ah, okay, big warehouses, big launch parties, people in suits would turn up and suddenly there'd be people with tape measures and tape measures, asking the punters, how big do you want your loft? And so in the midst of an installation, there's somebody taking measurements for something that they're about to flog and sell. So we know that there's been that relationship between industrial space, really interesting space, large space. Space that was often inhospitable to the dreams of ticky-tacky houses, which was pioneered by artists. In New York, of course, first of all but later on also in Berlin, London, and other places where you couldn't separate creativity from making money in a sense, vicariously. And of course the art market itself also got wind of the fact that art, at a certain point from a niche activity, actually became really sexy. I think installation art was umbilically linked to this development.

[00:26:09] Anastasia: Yeah, especially immersive installation art.

[00:26:13] Nicolas de Oliveira: yes, and especially in a post pandemic period.

[00:26:16] I mean, it was already happening before the pandemic and suddenly, post pandemic, there was this kind of refound interest in going to things that would be described as events, immersive events as you were just describing and. In a sense, it was the sort of counterpart of looking at a screen as we are right now. If this is the norm and we're looking at screens or people are looking at smartphones, then the one thing that they're looking for is an experience that would really knock your socks off. Which they can then, of course, go on social media and, you know, tell all their mates about and so on.

[00:26:53] But for us, the idea wasn't to proselytize to the world. But for us, the idea was to be there. To be there with a bunch of people and to do some stuff. We knew that this was powerful medicine, but we also knew that we were not going to be the people ultimately to, I guess, make the most out of it in terms of make a killing out of it. That was not what we were interested in at all.

[00:27:23] Anastasia: Tell me a bit about the role of curators when it comes to installation art, and what is the process of curating installation art?

[00:27:38] Nicolas de Oliveira: Hmm. There's an interesting argument around Boris Groys, the Russian theorist who wrote quite extensively, in the nineties and two thousands about installation art. And he talks about this notion of privatizing space. That the artist creating an installation is kind of privatizing space. Whereas a curator, on the other hand, in terms of an exhibition, a normal exhibition, not an installation, is effectively making space available for people and continuing a sort of status quo.

[00:28:10] I think installation art has learned very, very strongly from this position of the artist. Because as the artist privatizes space, what actually happens, and this is Groys' argument, they say: your space, the space that we all inhabit is now mine. I am now crafting it, shifting it, making it, internalising it. But at a certain point, I give it back to you. I give it to the audience for a temporary time. I loan the space as it were, my space to the audience, I gift it. So this exchange is something to do with this relationship between artist, artwork, space, audience, which is really very, very powerful, I think.

[00:28:57] And the, the idea at a certain point of curating something, curatorial practice some artists felt was a way of taking the power or cer a certain aspect of the power of authorship away from them. As somebody who's been working very, very closely with artists for so long, for Nici and I, the idea is that you are essentially part of a team to open up the discussion around the work. And yes, we'll push the artist because it's part of the process of spending time together. And this is what distinguishes our space, SE8 Gallery from lots of other spaces that yes, uh, the artist produces generally a new piece of work. which tends to be installation based, but not, not every show is necessarily exactly an installation, but every show I would say has learned massively from the input of installation art. we spend a lot of time, because we tend to do one or two shows a year. We also do quite a lot of shows in parallel abroad, projects abroad, so we're not always in London. So it kinda swings in roundabouts. And this relationship is such that it takes time to think about the work, advance the work, make the work, finish the work, then expose it to an audience. In the process of that happening, Nici and I generally are writing a book and the book always accompanies the exhibition and it's then launched at the end of the exhibition. Sometimes the artist writes as part of the book as well, their own writing. Some of the artists that we work with are writers in their own right and excellent writers. Others are dipping their toe into writing different formats like life writing, autobiography or auto fiction, diary writing, et cetera, chronicling the works themselves for the first time. But it really depends. So the book is another kind of co-production of the space that connects to the event.

[00:31:06] And it's really, I think, a super important aspect of it. Because it means that there are several aspects to the exhibition, all of which have some relationship to the curatorial. And the curatorial here means not the sort of simplistic classic, oh, I'm making a group show on the theme of water and I'm going to invite lots of artists who use water. I think that's the wrong idea here of curation. I think curatorial practice and I've run a master's in curating for a number of years with White Chapel Gallery in my own university. So a lot of discussion around curatorial practice, almost as an art practice. An artist like Goshka Macuga, for example, a really prominent Polish British artist, uh, who works almost exclusively as an artist through the notion of curation.

[00:32:01] Really interesting area of work, for instance. And so the kinship between artists and curators where it works is absolutely fundamental because it means that, first of all, I think you have a supporter and a friend. And when you're curating one-on-one, and I think this is quite different from when you're making a large institutional exhibition, which Nici and I have done where you're working with 20, 30 artists, et cetera. There, it's about being sensitive to what's required within the space and so on. Whereas when you're doing solo exhibitions or two handers, we just finished a show a few months ago in Portugal with two particular artists where we had to work very closely with them. the idea there is to strike up a relationship. and your question always has to be: what is the best for the event, the exhibition? What is the best for the artists? So I'm not suggesting that the producer, writer, curator, sacrifices themselves No, not at all. but you are an active agent within this relationship. And relationships are kind of difficult. They're kind of fickle. They're very different from artists to artists. So it really makes a difference. are you going to say hello? Nici is gonna come and say hello for a second.

[00:33:24] Anastasia: Great.

[00:33:25] Hi. How are you?

[00:33:28] I,

[00:33:28] Nicola Oxley: Very well, thank you.

[00:33:30] Anastasia: We were just talking about the role of curators in installation art.

[00:33:37] Nicola Oxley: Right.

[00:33:38] Um, think we always felt quite difficult to have that, that sort of title.

[00:33:43] Anastasia: why?

[00:33:45] Nicola Oxley: well, because in a sense, when we first started making exhibitions with artists, we found it such an integrated process that we didn't really think about what our role was, except that we were, you know, we started off as Nico studied some architecture and he also did some performance work. And I, I did find art at university and we just felt that we were working and wanting to work with artists just to see what happened in the process than being specifically saying that there was a separate role for us.

[00:34:22] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:23] Nicola Oxley: Because we actually enjoyed the fact that we felt that were all in it together and we just wanted to, I mean, Nico may have said that we had this grand idea 'cause we were very young at the time, that we would sort of make a Kunsthalle in London and that we would make this kind of integrated process where there was no financial involvement for anybody. we would do everything to kind of be together and work together. So that's why curating, it kind of has become something to us that is obviously there and is a part of the process. But it didn't start out like that really because at that point it was much more about having that kind of idea that there was, there was something that we felt that we wanted to work with and, and, and do.

[00:35:14] So that's why curating was the kind of word that wasn't really said very much either.

[00:35:19] Anastasia: Mm.

[00:35:20] Nicola Oxley: Whereas now it's very much a role and it's very much a part.

[00:35:24] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:35:25] Nicola Oxley: So feel as though it's kind of, it's been something that's evolved, that wasn't really to do with that kind process.

[00:35:33] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. And how do you find the artists and how do you decide who to work with, whose art to show in your space and so on?

[00:35:46] Nicola Oxley: That's always been quite an interesting thing because I suppose we, we, we got very interested in the process of working with artists. And at the time, because there was no internet, we did an awful lot of research in terms of finding artists because we, wrote a couple of books on on installation art.

[00:36:07] And we felt that it was a subject, especially when we were teaching that students kept saying to us, well, where are we gonna find information about these people? And what we really wanted to show was that there, there, not only worldwide, but there was a way of actually finding them. And so we did an awful lot of research. But we also wanted to show people that we felt, first of all, that we would work with and that the reciprocal arrangement would be that there will be something in it for them as well. So

[00:36:47] Anastasia: it's

[00:36:47] Nicola Oxley: a very odd thing to say, where did we find the artist? A lot of it was actually the artists coming and finding us.

[00:36:55] Anastasia: Oh really?

[00:36:56] Nicola Oxley: And so, and through that process we started to make decisions about not necessarily the kind of artists that we wanted to show, but the way that the artists would work within their practice became very important to us. So I think we've always worked in that sort of way that we weren't looking for people that would kind of either enable our career in some way, but were people that we really felt that there was an understanding and that we felt that it would be mutually interesting to work with each other.

[00:37:36] Nicolas de Oliveira: I think this question of, I mean, institutions generally have to represent. And they will need to show certain kinds of artists uh, support certain backgrounds, certain tendencies, et cetera. When you work in the way that we've done over all these years privately, it means that your responsibility ultimately is to art and to artists rather than the idea of representing uh, very broad constituencies.

[00:38:06] That said, for example we've always had a kind of 50-50 spread of men and women as artists. And these things weren't because there was a necessity for a rule or a particular quota, but it just seemed just, and it just seemed absolutely normal. So for us, when Nici's talking about this idea of finding us and we researching artists, it works both ways. And I mean, a lot of these decisions come out of knowledge, but a lot of them also come through happenstance. People would suddenly turn up and you'd realize that this person had been heavensent, this is exactly the one that you're looking for. Or sometimes you realize it kind of halfway through the project, the decision is actually a really interesting decision. And maybe artists also feel the same that way. I mean, we kind of believe in happenstance coming out of being there. You have to be there to be counted. That's really, really important. But once you're there and available, stuff happens that comes out of the work that you've already done. And hopefully this is a circle that highly sustainable.

[00:39:20] Anastasia: Yeah. And what does your writing process look like? Do you write together?

[00:39:25] Nicola Oxley: Yes.

[00:39:26] Anastasia: at the same time?

[00:39:30] Nicola Oxley: well you're, we're in the room that we actually use for writing. We have a very big table. I'm on one side, Nico's on the other. And it's a kind of role that we've developed is that we start with just looking for things that we feel. It's almost like a forensic investigation into how the artist works or feels or conversations. And through that kind of process, it develops. And thoughts and processes are written down by both of us. Then Nico is the person who actually puts the thing into a skeletal development so that you see a process and then you make it into a text.

[00:40:13] But then I will the text to him and we'll read it out loud, which we've found to be incredibly important to us. And through that process of actually reading out loud, we then develop editing and, and. But the process can take quite a long time. And we actually, again, through the way that we write, we kind of write because we want to write about the things that we write rather than being in a situation where we're just writing... we don't necessarily write things that we don't know anything about. So it's, very much a process that we keep. So I will say, as a good example, is an artist called Hans op de Beeck, who we know over long time

[00:41:04] Nicolas de Oliveira: whom you've interviewed.

[00:41:05] Anastasia: Who has been on this show before, yes.

[00:41:08] Nicola Oxley: Yeah. with Hans, when we first met him he was in a group show at our exhibition space. And he spent a lot of time in the corner doing lots of drawing, not really raising his head or speaking. He's very quiet. But we started to get really, really interested in him and his practice. And through that development of talking and, and just understanding what the work was, he asked us if we would do a large monograph on him of his work. And that actually meant for, I would say, very many years we've always been writing about him. And the process of that is an, I involve sort of involving process, but also a process that always stays very close to him as a person.

[00:42:00] Nicolas de Oliveira: the eminent American critic and writer, David Hickey says this wonderful thing that in order to write about art, you have to write about something else. And I think this has been one of those maxims that's been uppermost in our minds when writing about artists and artworks and making books and monographs and texts. Because we always said to the artist, well. It's not just about you. And I remember a certain moment where we put together a book on an artist called Stefan Bruggemann, a Mexican artist with whom we worked a long, long time and made several monographs on and stuff. And we were working with, we commissioned a really important writer called Chris Kraus. who also wrote amazing books, of auto fiction, such as I Love Dick. And she was an editor of Semiotics in New York and all that. And you know, she's one of those people that you look up to. And we were lucky enough to commission her to write on this particular artist. she wrote a beautiful text, which is very diaristic, very her own kind of way of working. And the artist looked at it and he said, but it's not about me. And we just fell about laughing and we said, well, hold on, it's not all about you, first of all. But the other thing to really understand is that in order to speak about somebody's work, the direct approach doesn't always work. The direct approach is the approach of a hack, not of a serious writer. Serious writers find a way around the subject and someone like Jonathan Lethem, for example, who's made an amazing book of his collected writings we have a pussycat in the room, come on, Percy. Um, He's often written for artists as an exchange. I'll give you a text, which is part fiction relating to your work and you give me a, a small drawing or something like that. And that's been a kinda relationship that he's had for many years. there's Percy, the gallery cat wandering around who has never ever touched an artwork, but he is very appreciative of, of art

[00:44:17] I'm just gonna let him out.

[00:44:18] Nicola Oxley: Okay. Nico's letting him out. so it's, it's just developed in the sense our writing in the terms of, again, it's not that we choose who we write about. But we, it seems that that happens. And through that we, we did an exhibition that had a kind of fictional publishing house. It was called Partial Fictions. And it was a bit mad because it was about 70 artists, writers, curators in the mix for three months. And in our relatively small space, it was constantly moving.

[00:44:57] So things were coming off the walls, other things were being removed, other people putting on performative pieces. Curators were coming in and we had vitrines that they, they were individually curating works in. And this partial fictions book, we invented the publishing house for it, which is Mulberry Tea Press. And from that we've written 14 books

[00:45:24] Anastasia: Wow.

[00:45:25] Nicola Oxley: of different artists, which are all about the artist. The generation of those books is, and this is where it becomes quite interesting for us, is because, sorry. Hello Percy.

[00:45:38] Anastasia: Hi.

[00:45:42] Nicola Oxley: Is from the, the fact that we also have done exhibitions. So we've curated exhibitions to which we have actually been paid. That money goes into a pot, and that pot pays for the production of the books.

[00:45:59] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:00] Nicola Oxley: Sometimes artists who work with different galleries or whatever will also pay for it. Sorry, this is this being a nuisance.

[00:46:11] Think out.

[00:46:13] Anastasia: I was actually gonna, that was my next question. How do these big projects, shows, and publications get funded?

[00:46:23] Nicolas de Oliveira: Well, there was a period in which we did a lot of fundraising. Because there, there are certain things that you simply cannot do unless you have significant funding. And in the days of Museum of Installation towards the end, I was spending most of my time trying to fundraise. And what this does, on the one hand, it makes you very central in a kind of art world, but it also has an impact on the very reason why you're doing this thing in the first place. And I think that brings its problems with it. And at a certain point we were offered an amazing space in Shoreditch in Central London, which is an old train station depot kind of thing. And Nici and I were standing overlooking this enormous hall. And looking at each other, we were with our architects thinking, is this for us? And we realized that was going to be the rest of our lives, dealing with a very large organization, spending most of our time fundraising, et cetera. And I think at that moment, something clicked and we thought, Hmm, this is gonna have such an impact.

[00:47:30] It's gonna change everything. And maybe that's not, the best thing to do. At which point I think things shifted a lot more from from making lots and lots of exhibitions to making less exhibitions, spending more time on the exhibitions, and conversely, doing lots more things like making books.

[00:47:49] And I think the books kind of in part were self-financing because we were having other jobs. I also worked as a consultant elsewhere. Nici's always worked in education. And so those things would support those activities. And that's a sort of blueprint that we've continued to this day in which the book production, as Nici has already explained is kind of part of a gift economy. we always make a certain number between three and 500 copies. They're pocket based, so they literally, we've measured this, they fit into your pocket. This is really, really important. Like an old fashioned penguin book, for example. The idea is that we encourage people to read about art, but actually to carry these things around with you.

[00:48:40] So this is the format that we work with. And so. The little books are just small things of beauty. And they're written by us and the artists together. Sometimes there's color, there's, there's very nice bits of paper um. Those sorts of things. And the artist gets a certain amount of them, and the artists sometimes sell them on their websites,

[00:49:07] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:07] Nicolas de Oliveira: or in bookshops, et cetera.

[00:49:09] We tend not to sell books because we prefer to engage in a gifting economy. In other words, our books circulate all around the world with people that we meet and the artists meet and you just go have a book. And because it's not a huge book, you can put it in your pocket and you can carry it around. And we used to do the very, very same thing with invitation cards with our first spaces, Unit7 gallery back in the eighties where we would hand make invitation cards out of all sorts of materials like asphalt, lead, plastic, ceramics, all sorts of things. And they were always fragments or responses to the exhibition made by the artist and made by us.

[00:49:54] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:54] Nicolas de Oliveira: So, somebody had an archive where they were collecting artist books and suddenly they produced these boxes in Antwerp, in Antwerp

[00:50:03] Nicola Oxley: of all places

[00:50:03] Nicolas de Oliveira: saying, oh, you are these guys who make these exhibitions because I have all your private view cards here for the last 10 years, and you think,

[00:50:10] Anastasia: Wow.

[00:50:10] Nicolas de Oliveira: how does that happen? And that's the kind of gifting economy also with the books that we really like to mind.

[00:50:17] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. Love that. Let's talk a bit about, something we touched on earlier, the art market and the place of installation art within that context. You know, like institutions, galleries, that the scale and the often ephemeral or site specific nature of installation versus the commercial side of art.

[00:50:43] Where does installation art fit in the art market?

[00:50:46] Nicolas de Oliveira: Well um, I, I think Nici and I are idealists. We are incorrigible idealists and we're, we're not moaning at all. It's just that we realize that there's different ways for different people to do stuff and there's different niches and the market occupies and ever-growing area but there's still niches for artists, independent producers, writers, et cetera, to function in.

[00:51:12] And sometimes this is actually in partnership with the market. So there are ways of working this in which it works for everybody. And the market itself in installation art, of course, back in the eighties when Nici and I started really didn't exist. I mean, Richard Wilson, for example, with 20:50

[00:51:30] That piece that's on the cover of our first installation art book, which we know helped his career immensely. But I think he sold that piece for less than 10,000 pounds to the Saatchis of the time. So this would be a kind of piece that you'd think, oh, that's priceless. And a lot of artists at that time when they were selling installations, they were selling 'em for very, very modest sums. Simply because nobody wanted to store the original material. And the idea of working with certificates, which of course is something that people like Sol Le Witt in the sixties and seventies pioneered, hadn't quite managed to get itself together at that period. Now it's very different. Now, of course, the artwork itself is often certificate based. Sometimes it's an edition anyway. It's also important to think that materials are perishable and can be replaced. So it's not about the physical things themselves often. It's about the idea, and that is part of the legacy of conceptual art, which actually for the market works in incredibly well because it means that you've got no storage issues at all. And the piece essentially is a set of instructions. And I know lots of artists have worked with this and commissioned works like Lucy Lippard with her amazing numbers shows and such like.

[00:52:52] Nicola Oxley: we've actually had this conversation recently with a friend of ours, a Norwegian artist who makes very, very, I mean, he, he's a painter as well as an installation artist. And he was asked to go back to a museum in, in Oslo. And they had three or four pieces of his, all of them were installation pieces. He found that they hadn't opened them from the day that his exhibition had finished. So they hadn't a clue what was inside the boxes. And they asked him if he could take everything out, reinterpret it for them. Because he's going to have an huge exhibition of his work. But they, they hadn't even taken it out of the boxes. And I'm sure that is happening a lot with work in certain points where it has stayed either archived somewhere, hopefully, well. Or, I suppose like us, who

[00:53:54] we

[00:53:55] would never say that we were going to keep the pieces of work. And in fact, we always said to the artists, the work is yours so you have a responsibility of it because we are not selling anything. so they would say, well, actually we take parts of it and we're working on pieces where this is appropriate and other parts of it are no longer appropriate. So we would have skip loads of certain things like wood go back to what it was. Or we'd try and say to art schools, do you want some materials? Because we have lots of material from a certain show. So that was another way of recycling certain parts of the work. But these things are, interesting because of when we were talking to our friend where he said it was interesting to him that they really didn't know what to do with the work.

[00:54:50] So he had to go in there. Luckily he's still around and he could do that. But then, as I said, there must be a lot of work that actually has that problem.

[00:55:00] Nicolas de Oliveira: I mean, for Hans op de Beeck, for example, who's just recently opened a gigantic exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, which covers, you know, like half the museum.

[00:55:14] Anastasia: Hmm.

[00:55:14] Nicolas de Oliveira: and he's the only contemporary artist that they've shown in a long, long time because it's all Flemish masters and such. And this parcours which is something like 30,000 square foot, it's just enormous. it's this immersive installation. Now, with that piece, the pieces actually came from his various warehouses dotted around Belgium, and he's always talked about the difficulty of keeping all that stuff. Because in his case, the things are literally sculpted.

[00:55:47] So it's not like he can chuck it all away

[00:55:49] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:55:50] Nicolas de Oliveira: Because he works in this area of sculptural installation. So a lot of things are repurposed and remade in different configurations for then different museums, et cetera. Or certainly for exhibitions. For a museum piece that's going to stay, if you're working with perishable materials, it's a real problem.

[00:56:10] Mm. And lots of artists I mentioned at the very beginning when we started talking, the Italian Arte Povera artists were so influential, you know, Paolini, Pistoletto, all those people, they were making things out of essentially household paint and bits of paper and bits of old wood, a lot of which of course have perished dreadfully. So materials decay. And we also know that artists and seminal artists, like Eva Hasse for instance, none of the early latex pieces are ever exhibited anymore. All that's exhibited are pieces of work, which under the estate have been allowed to be reproduced for exhibition purposes only. Meanwhile, the old latex pieces are sitting, stuck together, all sticky in a, in, in a dark warehouse, you know, and that's life.

[00:57:07] Anastasia: Yeah, I've just had this problem. I was unpacking my storage space and discovered there was some water damage. So it's like, oh, great. Can I salvage this? Do I have to remake this? What do I do? You know, like,

[00:57:21] Nicola Oxley: I think there is certainly that problem. But I, I was thinking of Marcel Broodthaers Who we used on the kind of European set of books.

[00:57:31] Who suddenly became an installation artist 'cause it was the front of our book. And I thought, I don't, I don't know if he was an installation artist in the sense I thought. We chose him because we thought that he was a wonderful artist as process from being a poet to making artworks, ending up in a garage in London at one point where he had no storage anywhere. Neither did he have any money to actually store stuff. So there are always these amazing stories connected to how artists in the main make work, keep work, or if they sell it, what, becomes of it eventually. How it is seen. And I think that that in itself is something that because it is connected to consumerism or on the financial side of it, it becomes even more crucial to certain people that it is, it is authentic. I think that that is also another discussion, which is huge, about what is inauthenticity, when it was made, who it was made by, who actually intervened in the process of making. And with installations, a lot of them were made obviously by the artists, but a lot of people were actually well they worked with the artists to make the works as well.

[00:58:47] We

[00:58:47] Anastasia: Hmm.

[00:58:48] Nicola Oxley: had lots who worked with the artists on lots of pieces, lots of pieces that we needed to get technical advice on. We had lots of people coming in and helping the artists to do things. So there's a production team of people, like with Hans, need to be there to do that. But because he has a very particular view of his work, he's very much the fulcrum, the person on top of the whole thing, making sure that it is delivered as he wishes.

[00:59:18] And when we were talking to him, 'cause we walked through the exhibition with him in Antwerp and for us it's, it's very important for us to see how he has traveled through the art world. Because when we first met him, he was making very specific, much smaller pieces or large drawings would help to pay for the actual pieces that he was making.

[00:59:42] Anastasia: Hmm.

[00:59:43] Nicola Oxley: So I think these, these ways and understanding how artists work on ephemeral work. And how they should be delivered up is still a very big kind of,

[00:59:54] Nicolas de Oliveira: I mean, I think the same thing, the same thing can be said for, for other contemporary artists. Like we, worked with uh, a duo of Korean artists, Moon and Jeon, they're amazing, absolutely amazing. They showed at Documenta, they showed at Tate and various other organizations, and they make very large, they've built enormous sets and they did the Korean pavilion, for example, at the Vens Biennale. In order to do that, they replicated the entire Korean pavilion as a shell in a studio in Seoul, for instance.

[01:00:31] Anastasia: Wow.

[01:00:33] Nicolas de Oliveira: in order to photograph it and then in the real pavilion then project it, 'cause it, that's the only way that you could do it, because the pavilion is largely glazed. So they had to make a solid version to project on it, in order to re project. I mean, it's kind of complicated. But anyway, in their case, pieces of work were selling for a certain amount and the installations were generally editions of three, which was a film and the installation. But they could just about make ends meet. And they would say, oh, we are non-for-profit experimentational artist. And you're going, you're what? You're superstars. No, no, no. We can barely make ends meet. Because they didn't sell anything outside of those three versions of the work. Each one was something, I can't remember exact figures, but was maybe $150,000 or something like that.

[01:01:30] I can't remember, I mean, don't quote me. The production of these amazing films, I mean, they are like, you know, huge special effects movies that just happen to be 10 or 15, 20 minutes long. And as a result the artist is just about breaking even. So that's the sort of downside if you don't do anything else.

[01:01:53] Whereas someone like Hans op de Beeck on the other hand and lots of other artists sell large drawings or sell sculptures in order to fund these major, major installations. And the installations then, like his Art Basel, installation of the library,

[01:02:11] which is all this giant library in which people mill about and the library is gray.

[01:02:16] And the only color in the shot, and it looks really amazing on screen are t-shirts of the, the passes by in it. So a piece like that would be like a signature piece, and that signature piece means that it's supported by all the other work that an artist like that can sell. And there you need the both in order to make the whole enterprise function.

[01:02:43] Anastasia: Yeah, we were talking to Hans about this, how it's amazing that, you know, you kind of maybe do an installation. Maybe you have to fund part of the production yourself or, or you get a set artist fee. But then if the show is really popular and it has tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of visitors, the museum benefits from it. But the artist doesn't see anything of that. Like even though they are the ones who drew the crowd.

[01:03:18] Nicola Oxley: I think that's the problem. That's why I said about the, when we were talking to our friend about his pieces that had not been taken out of their boxes, not even checked by anybody for a very, very long time. I think there is a lot of responsibility that has to be given over to those museums to understand exactly the process that an artist has to go to make that piece that we saw in Antwerp actually work, function. And I think they've become slightly complacent with the idea when they set off to have something like that, that actually the responsibility of that is purely on the artist's shoulders.

[01:04:02] Anastasia: Mm.

[01:04:03] Nicola Oxley: I think that's something that Nico and I, I mean we're very small in the terms of any of those things, but we've always made it really clear to the artist that we will be with them through the whole process, from the point of beginning, which is perhaps a proposal of ,drawings to the ideas that they have, to the point where they enter the space because there's nothing in the space until they start building perhaps, or the things that they bring in. To staying with them through that process, helping them, making sure that it is as they wish it to be.

[01:04:38] And at the end of it, we always, always make sure that they have a very good record of the actual exhibition. .And the small book or whatever. So that is our part of the process that goes back to this idea of whether we look at ourselves as curators or where we fit within that. Because there is a kind of feeling nowadays that there's all these different compartments, you know, curators are one compartment, administrators of museums are others, but where is the artist in that process?

[01:05:17] Nicolas de Oliveira: I think this issue of, of the components that surround an event like an art exhibition where every component has its particular directive, everybody has their particular job. And after all, we live in highly specialist times. I mean, the jobs are more and more specialist, and yet at the same time, there's also a kind of onus for people to have a wider understanding of various parts. For us this seems incredibly obvious because in our case, this indistinction between curating, writing, producing, fundraising, hosting, cooking, chatting, all of those kinds of things are, are absolutely essential. In our terms, we do all of those. I'm not saying that we do all of them amazingly, but we do all of them as part of a complete package. And I think those kinds of things support artists in a way that institutions find very, very hard. Institutions because of their scale, are always in a situation where they're having to split up the jobs.

[01:06:30] That's completely understandable. But this is where smaller producers, smaller galleries, independent spaces, independent curators, I think really come to the fore. Because we are the kinds of individuals that have a lot of different skills that can be put at the service in co-production, in collaboration with artists. And this is one of the reasons why, I mean, to give you an example, we were working with one particular artist who was showing at Tate Modern at the same time in a large exhibition. And he was doing a very particular show with us. And people said, how on earth did you wrangle this guy?

[01:07:09] How did you get him? And the answer is very, very simple. Because we had, with SE8 Gallery, a very specific project, which is called the Vitrine Project for one year, in which we had built very large scale vitrines, three of them. Put them in the space, and artists were one at a time invited for a month to fill them. And so essentially they were making a new work, vitrine based. Now the artist, this was Ian Kiaer, jumped to this and said, this sounds like a great project. I'll do it. So in other words, if you offer something that's particular, that's really specific, it can work even with artists who have very little time or who are extremely well known, et cetera. And you have a kind of niche. And I think one of the really important aspects with what Nici and I have been doing sustainably over so long, is to always try and find a place where you can be as curators, writers, producers, and so on and so forth, but also where you can have an impact, you can support artists. All of that leads to, I think, an interesting practice.

[01:08:20] Anastasia: Hmm. Yeah, I think the kind of support you're talking about is vital, I would say, to making really good work as an artist. and it's rare when you do come across people who really understand the kind of process artists has to go through and the kind of support they might need along the way.

[01:08:46] Yeah.

[01:08:47] Nicolas de Oliveira: And also I think that there's artists of very different backgrounds, ages, and needs. And it's part of what you have to do when you kind of sensitize yourself to a process of work, that you're going to need to spend quite a lot of time with them. And time is one of the things that we have very, very little of today.

[01:09:07] That's one of the reasons why at a certain point we stopped doing lots of shows in a year in our spaces, but instead decided to do things that were much more um, time rich.

[01:09:20] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:21] Nicolas de Oliveira: Spending time with artists, letting them develop the pieces. And in fact, this really came to proper fruition. I mean, we'd already set it up, but the most salient example would be during the pandemic.

[01:09:33] During the pandemic, we were about to open with an exhibition of an artist who is um, collecting fossils from the river every day of the year. and we're very close to the river. It's an artist called Olivia Guigue and French.

[01:09:48] These, these are all manmade fossils. In other words, fossils from the Anthropocene. And had an archive of thousands and thousands of pieces, fossilized chewing gum and things like that. I mean, it's just extraordinary things. There you go. Here's some fossilized chewing gum.

[01:10:06] Anastasia: Great.

[01:10:07] Nicolas de Oliveira: You can just about see it. I mean, think about these things that have been sitting in the river for decades and have actually been inside the mouth of an individual. And she was basically building this museum piece in the space. Because we couldn't open the show for two years, she essentially used the space as her kind of archive. And she, from there, she would depart every day and she would then come back and in the yard she'd wash these pieces, dry them, then start cataloging them, and eventually this finally led to a show just after the pandemic was over. So this goes to show how sometimes the commitment is very, very long. We hadn't expected it quite that long, but there you go.

[01:10:47] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. What advice would you give an artist who's just starting out in the installation space?

[01:10:55] who's maybe like I emerging, trying to make installation art, unrepresented. What should they do? What's a good advice for them?

[01:11:07] Nicolas de Oliveira: Ooh.

[01:11:08] Nicola Oxley: I mean, in my terms, I suppose, because Nico said at one point that we both taught in art schools, and you are always on the kind of edge of not wanting to preempt what someone is going to expect from being through a course. You want them to really absorb it, to really immerse themselves into the idea of a practice. I think that that to me is something that they have to do. They have to really understand what their practice is. It's very, very interesting when you meet artists and you feel you know that that person is always going to be working, and to be an artist, despite whether or not they are represented by anybody.

[01:11:57] Nicolas de Oliveira: I'm, despite the context,

[01:11:58] Nicola Oxley: the commercial side of it,

[01:11:59] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:00] Nicola Oxley: but there is a driver there outside of all that. It's a bit like when we say that the people that we work with are obviously a little further along perhaps or far that process of understanding their practice.

[01:12:15] They know what their practice is. They're involved in their practice. But when we were certainly working with young students about it, we'd say: you have to really invest time looking at people's work, understanding work. You have to find things. You have to feel that you are very much in that as, as something that is very important to you and is going to be something you want to stay in. It could be that in a couple of years of leaving college, they end up by being teachers or they may completely change their idea, but they still are directed by what it was that they got from their training in some ways. So I don't know if there's an A to Z in that. I don't know if you start at a point and then it develops, because I think everybody that I've known, and I'm sure you know as well, are people that have had to go through all sorts of things to develop a practice.

[01:13:15] Nicolas de Oliveira: I mean this word practice, I think is really important that Nici is raising because if Nici's saying that practice comes first, then that means that outcomes come later. So it's like cart and horses, horses and cart, which comes first. And I think if you put the cart before the horse, you have a problem.

[01:13:38] In other words, if you put your desires of: I want to make a living out of art. If that's your kind of motivation, then that has certain consequences. If you're saying, I want to establish a practice, I think that has more longevity. Because whatever happens, if you simply want to establish a strong practice, you'll never be disappointed. Because practice isn't immediately about visibility. It's about yourself. It's about creativity. It's about making. It's about being in a kind of space by yourself, also sometimes with other people. That is a real driver. Everything else develops from there.

[01:14:16] And yes, of course, you're clearly right that there are strategies that you can employ. And one of the strategies that Nici and I have, have always employed is that you work together. Working together. I mean, one of the things that clearly kept us functioning is that there's two of us, I mean, whatever you do, there's two of us. Which on the one hand you might say complicates things. It does. But it also means it's sustainable. Because you feed off each other. And when there's two, there's three and four and five and six.

[01:14:49] And this idea of working with small numbers of people who are dedicated to a project is really, really key, I think, to smaller producers, independent galleries, and so on. Because that way you can rely on, in a sense, everything that's within reach. You know, put your arm out and see what you can touch.

[01:15:11] This haptic quality, I think is incredibly important. That you can rely on. From there, you've then built already a power base, and if you can move that power base to other spaces, other places, that's exactly what we did. And so we ended up doing shows all over the world. And that really makes sense to us.

[01:15:31] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:15:33] Nicola Oxley: I don't know. It sounds idealistic.

[01:15:36] Nicolas de Oliveira: It is.

[01:15:37] Nicola Oxley: But that we're not going to apologize for. Because in a sense that's, that's how we always have felt. I mean, it has not been an easy ride to say that you have an exhibition space. You have a kind of set of ideals of what you want it to stand up to. You want to produce certain things with it. You want to make sure that the artist has the materials that they needed. That there's no sense that they don't understand the process that they're in. All of that, if you don't have the money, relies on a huge amount of input in terms of time and energy to find all those things. And I think that's something that if anybody is setting themselves up into a career with something, would start to understand the amount of time and effort it takes. Going back to this idea of perhaps museums and maybe sometimes big commercial galleries, they want artists to perform. Perhaps they've forgotten that they also need a huge amount of, of help and support.

[01:16:43] So that reciprocal thing is something that Nico and I have always felt is absolutely key to everything that we do, whether in teaching, it's a reciprocal thing when you're sitting with, with students, talking to 'em about work. It feeds you as well, your understanding how they're thinking, what they're doing, how they look at the world. And that's something that through everything that we've done, Nico and I, that we've just been amazed by. Every time you start working with an artist, something crops up that perhaps you never even thought about they were gonna do. Maybe the good process is that we never demand that it is what they set out to be in a proposal.

[01:17:28] They can change anything at the time through us talking to them or going through stuff with them. And I think if somebody sets out to be in the path that we've been in, then they just have to, as Nico says, we've been very lucky. There are two of us. And in a way, which is also amazing, we can argue about whether or not we feel that one way of working is good or one way isn't. But we are resolute in the fact that what we do is for this project that we've set up, god knows how many years ago. So perhaps people have to also look for things that they find in galleries. I always used to say, you know, if you are interested in art, you should be visiting every gallery that you can put your nose into. Talking to people inside them. If you are really interested in it, make yourself a nuisance almost by going there and even saying you want to do some work there. Try to understand what it is. Because people will look at you and ask you, what do you know about us? And if they say, well, I've read a article in, you know, art review or something, that's not gonna be enough. So you have to really immerse yourself in the practice of making things and understanding it.

[01:18:44] Nicolas de Oliveira: this question, I mean, we've been talking about immersivity earlier on for the audience. And Nici's now brought in this question that artists immerse themselves in the art world as you know, active agents, producers. And this idea of immersion, I think is incredibly important because we live in a time when so much is second, third, fourth hand. you, you're not producing content yourself necessarily often, but you are simply retweeting, passing on, reenacting something. And I'm not suggesting that there is, I'm not going to harp on about originality, that's a whole other discussion. and I don't think it's a terribly interesting one, by the way.

[01:19:30] But I think it is very important to be somewhere where you have agency. Where you can touch stuff, you can do stuff, you can be close to people that you can speak to them. There's no point in saying, oh, I've heard so and so said that so and so did so and so. Well, no, that's gossip, that's hearsay. And it does not give you power, per se, unless you are at the Court of Louis IV kind of thing. And you are a whisperer. But rather, I think that in the work, one of the lessons from installation art is that installation art is massively hands on. There's lots of issues to be sorted out. Installation art is big. It requires bodies. You need to shift things. You need to do stuff. You need to have knowledge of the world. And the only way that you have knowledge of the world is that you touch it. And by touching, I mean physically, mentally, intellectually, emotionally. And you are in it and you are indeed immersed.

[01:20:37] Anastasia: Love that thought.

[00:03:18] Anastasia: thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk on the Installation Art podcast. It's a huge honor to have you,

[00:03:26] Nicolas de Oliveira: My pleasure entirely.

[00:03:27] Anastasia: I'm sorry to hear Nicola isn't feeling well

[00:03:31] Nicolas de Oliveira: Yeah. It's, it's kind of sad, but she very much wanted to be part of it, but she's just, she's just coughing and spluttering. It would not make for a proper broadcast.

[00:03:41] Anastasia: next time maybe.

[00:03:43] Nicolas de Oliveira: Indeed.

[00:03:44] Anastasia: Let's start by tell me about where have you come from, and how did you discover contemporary art for yourself?

[00:03:54] Nicolas de Oliveira: I grew up in Portugal.

[00:03:56] Anastasia: Wow.

[00:03:56] Nicolas de Oliveira: my parents are Portuguese and German. So my connection with England comes much later and I ended up studying architecture in London, which is how I came to be in this country. Not intending to stay longer than the study period, but as these things often happen, I ended up staying and met Nicola and Nicola Oxley is my life partner, wife.

[00:04:27] And we've always had the contemporary art connection between ourselves. So her background was as a fine artist studying at Goldsmiths in the sort of important period of, of post conceptual art. And in my case was looking at architecture and looking at space. So the combination, I guess between the two, between art and space led us, I think, quite neatly to this discovery of what, at that time, back in the 1980s was a very unexplored term, namely installation art.

[00:05:05] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. Very interesting. So what was installation art like and like who made it, who talked about it back in those days?

[00:05:16] Nicolas de Oliveira: I think we were chroniclers, I guess as we were making books. But also prior to that we were producers. And I think this is often the case with who are at the sort of vanguard of stuff. not just looking at their peers and certainly they're not looking at history for inspiration looking forward, but they're actually looking at what can I do? And that's what I mean by you become a producer almost by default, because you have a nose that something might be out there, you don't quite know what it is, but you're willing to explore it. And in that sense, of course, the legacy was very much American and European, particularly, New York artists who were instrumental in terms of, you know, the sort of historical early aspects of environments and sculptures. And at the same time also Arte Povera in Italy was massively influential. Meanwhile, also Yves Klein, a sort of monumental French artist who was doing performances and was doing proto installations. I mean, a lot of people were doing things they but weren't naming as such, installation art. They were naming them all sorts of other things, interventions, environments, happenings, Allan Kaprow's famous happenings, for example,

[00:06:45] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:06:46] Nicolas de Oliveira: which were, I guess part theater, part conceptual art. Dan Graham's performances of describing how his body was feeling, standing on one leg in front of an audience. They're just fascinating documents. The great thing is that nowadays you can look at those things online, these sort of scratchy black and white videos, and you go, oh, I wonder what that was like to be there.

[00:07:08] But in fact, when you're asking me what was it like in the eighties, I guess for your generation, it's another one of those moments where you kind of think that that must have been a sort of pioneering time. For us, that was just quite normal. But that's always the experience of a person who's producing stuff or witnessing stuff in a certain moment.

[00:07:31] It seems really normal. Seen from a distance through other eyes, through your viewers, listeners and so on and so forth, it seems extraordinary, but it was perfectly normal. I can guarantee you.

[00:07:42] Anastasia: Right. So when you say you were producers, that means you were making installation art at the time?

[00:07:50] Nicolas de Oliveira: Well, Nicola was definitely making installation art as an artist. She cast a complete floor of a space in plaster when she was at Goldsmith's in the gallery. And the idea was for people to walk on the thing and destroy the piece. And that was really early. And this was way before artists like Rachel Whiteread and so on and so forth were casting things in plaster. But I guess that, again, Bruce Nauman beat everybody to it anyway. So it's not like plaster has a kind of copyright on it, rather it's a sort of material that people were messing with. And she certainly made a really beautiful piece out of that. So her background was very much in terms of making those types of works. But I think that when you are looking at other artists, and I think this was the key for us, we weren't looking at exhibitions, curatorial projects, museums, galleries. We were looking at what artists were making. And I think this was particularly to do with smaller galleries, project spaces and so on, which were beginning to emerge in London in the early 1980s. And I think that was a, a really seminal moment. And London was an interesting place at that period for production. And production particularly I think because it wasn't necessarily a place to sell work, rather it was a place to produce work. I think that was a real distinction in terms of the market.

[00:09:26] The market catches up to installation art in a completely different way later on, but that's, that's another story which We can kind of go into.

[00:09:33] Anastasia: We can come back to this.

[00:09:35] Nicolas de Oliveira: absolutely. But, but, but certainly there was a kind of vibe there in terms of people making stuff. And we, as producers started our first gallery, which is called Unit 7 Gallery back in 1986, which we ran for four and a half years, in an old luggage factory. And that was the kind of space that was happening, I think, in London, but also in America, in New York, on the West Coast and select few other places where I think artists mainly were flexing their muscles to try and see what could happen, but also I think in terms of exploring this key relationship between space and art and the audience.

[00:10:22] Now, clearly, this is something in terms of sculpture had been mined a little bit by minimal artists in the late sixties and uh, and early seventies, and yet something kind of kicked off that was slightly different when installation art came on.

[00:10:39] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. So how did you then move into the curating and writing side of your work?

[00:10:48] Nicolas de Oliveira: At that particular period, publication I guess printing very expensive, was tricky. So everything we did was about not bringing in stuff that existed, but essentially commissioning artists to make new works, single artists. And similarly, when it came to documentation, one of the things that I think it was, especially Nicola, realized straight from the off to have good documentation of the exhibitions, given that these are all perishable pieces, where the materials afterwards would end up in a skip and the event essentially will be up for a month or six weeks or whatever, and never to be seen again.

[00:11:31] And that was the vibe at that time. It's very, very different the way that this functions today with large warehouses and certificates and so on. Then it was just about production. So documentation was the flip side of the production. Without the production, and lots of artists would say, oh, I'm just doing it, I just want to have it in the ether and never to be seen again. And this kind of anti-market, anti-this, anti that. And we thought, hold on a second. There is going to be a story of this. There is going to be a history of this. And I think time proved us right.

[00:12:06] And the one investment we made while we had this big warehouse space was to invest in a good photographer. And the photographer taught us so much. A guy called Edward Woodman who was a photographer mainly of 3D works at the time. And he would come into the space and say, there's three or four shots in this. Let me demonstrate to you. And he'd arrive with his Hasselblad and you just be perched over the top of this.

[00:12:32] And he'd show you, you see there's really only these shots. And we'd go, Hey, come on. But what about the jazzy shots to make things look good and interesting. And he'd argue, do you want have things recorded as documents or do you want flashy photographs? And we said, of course, you know, the documents is much, much more important.

[00:12:54] And in fact, once again, history sort of bore him out. And we learned a great deal from him. And he was actually one of our first sponsors because he said, you'll just pay for the film and for the developing, but my time, I gift you because I think this is a really, really interesting project. So you rubbed along together with someone like that.

[00:13:13] That in turn led actually quite directly to publishing. We knew he'd been doing a lot of photographs of, at that time in London and elsewhere, people like seminal artists or who became seminal artists like Helen Chadwick, for example, Ed Ellington, lots of others. And he had been doing the photographs of a lot of their installations in off spaces, small galleries and such. So he'd made a name for himself and we then approached Thames & Hudson with another partner to try and put together a book on installation art because we realized that there wasn't such a book.

[00:13:58] As a result, Installation Art, the first book came out in 1994, but in fact it was in the works four years earlier. And it took Thames & Hudson, who were at the time, the sort of biggest publisher. They're still a very big publisher, could actually sell this. Because simply the, uh, the people at the book fairs didn't believe that there was such a thing as installation art that was going to be of any great import.

[00:14:27] And similarly, in terms of books, the galleries that we approached for slides, in those days, there were of course slides and sometimes they'd send us these amazing big transparencies from New York galleries and you'd think it was Christmas. And they'd say, no, no, no, this is all sculpture, alright? And we'd go, no, it isn't! I mean, this is something else. So this seems real anathema when you think about it from today because it's just so obvious. Back then, not at all. And the other thing that was really interesting was that rare was the gallery or the space or the artist that documented the work. And so therefore, when we were casting around for images for our first book, it was a really tricky one because a lot of people had photographs of the private view, for example, with lots of people milling around drinking. And we'd go, where's the photographs? And I remember this with the ICA in London, for instance, a very important kind of production space, And they'd say we didn't take any photographs of the exhibition because we didn't think it was important. And you

[00:15:31] Anastasia: Wow.

[00:15:32] Nicolas de Oliveira: I mean, nowadays you'd think you're nuts.

[00:15:34] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:15:35] Nicolas de Oliveira: in a sense, in, in a roundabout way, that's how we got into making books and publishing because you realized that there was a niche in the market that needed filling. And that was specifically to do with a certain kind of book, the installation art books of which there are two with 10 years apart, where the first one kind of mines the arrival of installation art and site specificity in particular. And the second one focuses to a much greater extent on the idea of interaction and the audience and the way that the audience becomes a kind of co-producer of the work.

[00:16:14] And certainly introduces these aspects of immersion. And one of the terms that we kind of pioneered in that book very strongly, and that was in 2003, was this whole idea of immersion. And immersion is of course something that nowadays, you know, we're completely inured to. 'Cause you just go, Hey, come on, immersion has been there since the dawn of time. And we can tell you, well it wasn't.

[00:16:36] Anastasia: Yeah. Well, it's amazing to hear that you even had to convince galleries that what they were showing was in fact installation art and not just sculpture.

[00:16:48] Nicolas de Oliveira: Yep. I mean, commercial galleries in those days, I think maybe also, especially in Britain, were quite conservative. And a lot of the experimentation was happening much more in offsites, artist run spaces. And also a few organizations that were a little bit more forward looking. That were things like, you know, the Whitechapel Gallery, the ICA, the Camden Art Center, those types of spaces were much more in the vanguard.

[00:17:20] And those are publicly funded spaces rather than private spaces. I think things have changed a great deal in the intervening years in that, I mean, Nici and I have also worked quite extensively with, with private collections especially and we're doing books on private collections and what have you. But I think a lot of experimentation today is actually being paid for by the private sector. Why? the private sector has realized that there's actually serious money to be made uh, with the avant-garde, at the coalface where stuff is happening. And after all, we live in an age of influencers.

[00:18:00] So I need to tell you nothing about this.

[00:18:02] Anastasia: Hmm. Well speaking of spaces tell me a bit about Museum of Installation.

[00:18:09] Nicolas de Oliveira: Museum of Installation was the brainchild of Nici and I together with a third partner. And, we were directing it and he was the financial director. And then everything kind of um, shifted a little bit around, but uh, we started this off as an idea of having an institution that wasn't an institution.

[00:18:32] It was a kind of counter institution. Maybe a little bit like in places like New York, the New museum, that sort of thing. Which of course became a proper institution, but it started very much from an artist space. And we wanted to give real credence to this idea of installation art as a force. And in 1990, essentially we started this thing and it ran for, I mean, as a, as a going space until 2003, 2004. So quite a long time. And we shifted buildings during that period. The idea was to work initially on the first site in um, uptown, in the center of town to work with single artists. And the idea was to commission and build together as a team of people new works with the artists that we'd commissioned. So a new work would be produced each time. And so we were doing five- six shows each year with proper build time in between. And the idea was to give artists a little bit of duration and a lot of help because there were several of us, we worked with a lot of volunteers. Nicola was running a department in a university of fine art. so we could rely on having hands to help and people to inspire and people to help also with technical aspects. We also had of people who were working in things like special effects and other workshops of that kind. And when suddenly something was going completely wrong, you'd get on the phone, you'd say help!

[00:20:12] And I think the word help has been a constant in all of our endeavors, because you never know everything. You become fairly good at building stuff, problem solving, fundraising, all of those sorts of things. But the word help means that you know that there's a constellation of other people around you. I wouldn't call it a network. I think networks are something else. They're much more kind of mercenary, much more transactional. In our case, it was a bunch of friendships really. And I think lots of artists will be able to attest to that, that those friendship groups actually really drive things. And in fact, sustain. Sustainability is the sort of key thing that people talk about today.

[00:20:54] And sustainability of like, oh, we've been here for a year, you think, Hmm. Next year we're coming up to 40 years of making spaces. And making spaces on absolute shoestring budgets. How does that happen? Well, it happens because a bunch of people decide that this is worth doing. And that doesn't mean to say that your ambitions are any, the less. Your ambitions are the same as the big galleries, the museums the really interesting spaces worldwide. But you need to work with other people to make those things happen.

[00:21:28] Anastasia: Yeah, sounds like something that is really needed all around the world, like iterations of Museum of Installation. We definitely need one in Australia, I think. Are you currently running any kind of exhibition spaces?

[00:21:47] Nicolas de Oliveira: Yeah. After museum installation ceased as a, as a working space, we started another organization and this led to the gallery that we currently run, which is SE8 Gallery. And during the period of Museum of Installation, we also always did lots of outside sites. Outside sites are simply a description of saying: we have our base site in which we do exhibitions. At one stage we had a building with several small floors in which we were working not on single exhibitions, but you know, three or four artists at the same time or five or six. So that really opened up the exposure to a much larger extent. We always worked very, very internationally. And then we had sites that opened and closed temporarily in different places. So one moment we'd have a show on of Phyllida Barlow at the main site, for example, who's a really important British sculptor. And at the same time we'd have Terry Smith working with us in a room, a giant room, in fact, that was gifted to us at the British Museum. And then three months later, we'd be doing something at the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale where we'd get invited to curate a single project in a church.

[00:23:10] Anastasia: Hmm.

[00:23:10] Nicolas de Oliveira: So those were the kind of offsites that we were using. And they would pop and off depending on what was available. And availability of spaces, I think was very different then from what it is now.

[00:23:22] Anastasia: In what way?

[00:23:23] Nicolas de Oliveira: young artists, I think, often talk today about spaces not being available. And a lot of that is to do with real estate, of course.

[00:23:31] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:23:32] Nicolas de Oliveira: And the stories that we can tell from London are echoed, I think in New York, are echoed certainly in Berlin for example, but several decades ago. So for example, we worked in Berlin a number of times. And in Berlin after the fall of the wall, in the late eighties and then in the early nineties, there was suddenly lots of space available.

[00:23:55] And this led to really interesting projects starting. Some of those projects became mainstream spaces like KW, Kunst-Werke for example, the celebrated kind of civic space in Mitte, in Berlin. But that whole area was kind of almost razed to the ground, and it was just a bunch of shells, and they refurbished them. Why? Because it was cheap. People were casting around, people were excited about new things happening. And so one thing led to another. Obviously the developers moved in in time because they got quicker and quicker at catching up. In London, for example. The areas that we were in around east end was a completely wasteland when you looked at the footage from the 1980s. I mean, it's beautiful and really interesting and really gnarly in a sense, really rough. We like that sort of thing. I think it's very conducive for artists and warehouses and all this production really. But it's not where the money would go. The money came later. And nowadays, I mean, of course, this is the legacy of stuff that happened in the 1990s. People would do big installation shows and where would they do them? Ah, okay, big warehouses, big launch parties, people in suits would turn up and suddenly there'd be people with tape measures and tape measures, asking the punters, how big do you want your loft? And so in the midst of an installation, there's somebody taking measurements for something that they're about to flog and sell. So we know that there's been that relationship between industrial space, really interesting space, large space. Space that was often inhospitable to the dreams of ticky-tacky houses, which was pioneered by artists. In New York, of course, first of all but later on also in Berlin, London, and other places where you couldn't separate creativity from making money in a sense, vicariously. And of course the art market itself also got wind of the fact that art, at a certain point from a niche activity, actually became really sexy. I think installation art was umbilically linked to this development.

[00:26:14] Anastasia: Yeah, especially immersive installation art.

[00:26:18] Nicolas de Oliveira: yes, and especially in a post pandemic period.

[00:26:21] I mean, it was already happening before the pandemic and suddenly, post pandemic, there was this kind of refound interest in going to things that would be described as events, immersive events as you were just describing and. In a sense, it was the sort of counterpart of looking at a screen as we are right now. If this is the norm and we're looking at screens or people are looking at smartphones, then the one thing that they're looking for is an experience that would really knock your socks off. Which they can then, of course, go on social media and, you know, tell all their mates about and so on.

[00:26:58] But for us, the idea wasn't to proselytize to the world. But for us, the idea was to be there. To be there with a bunch of people and to do some stuff. We knew that this was powerful medicine, but we also knew that we were not going to be the people ultimately to, I guess, make the most out of it in terms of make a killing out of it. That was not what we were interested in at all.

[00:27:28] Anastasia: Tell me a bit about the role of curators when it comes to installation art, and what is the process of curating installation art?

[00:27:43] Nicolas de Oliveira: Hmm. There's an interesting argument around Boris Groys, the Russian theorist who wrote quite extensively, in the nineties and two thousands about installation art. And he talks about this notion of privatizing space. That the artist creating an installation is kind of privatizing space. Whereas a curator, on the other hand, in terms of an exhibition, a normal exhibition, not an installation, is effectively making space available for people and continuing a sort of status quo.

[00:28:15] I think installation art has learned very, very strongly from this position of the artist. Because as the artist privatizes space, what actually happens, and this is Groys' argument, they say: your space, the space that we all inhabit is now mine. I am now crafting it, shifting it, making it, internalising it. But at a certain point, I give it back to you. I give it to the audience for a temporary time. I loan the space as it were, my space to the audience, I gift it. So this exchange is something to do with this relationship between artist, artwork, space, audience, which is really very, very powerful, I think.

[00:29:02] And the, the idea at a certain point of curating something, curatorial practice some artists felt was a way of taking the power or cer a certain aspect of the power of authorship away from them. As somebody who's been working very, very closely with artists for so long, for Nici and I, the idea is that you are essentially part of a team to open up the discussion around the work. And yes, we'll push the artist because it's part of the process of spending time together. And this is what distinguishes our space, SE8 Gallery from lots of other spaces that yes, uh, the artist produces generally a new piece of work. which tends to be installation based, but not, not every show is necessarily exactly an installation, but every show I would say has learned massively from the input of installation art. we spend a lot of time, because we tend to do one or two shows a year. We also do quite a lot of shows in parallel abroad, projects abroad, so we're not always in London. So it kinda swings in roundabouts. And this relationship is such that it takes time to think about the work, advance the work, make the work, finish the work, then expose it to an audience. In the process of that happening, Nici and I generally are writing a book and the book always accompanies the exhibition and it's then launched at the end of the exhibition. Sometimes the artist writes as part of the book as well, their own writing. Some of the artists that we work with are writers in their own right and excellent writers. Others are dipping their toe into writing different formats like life writing, autobiography or auto fiction, diary writing, et cetera, chronicling the works themselves for the first time. But it really depends. So the book is another kind of co-production of the space that connects to the event.

[00:31:11] And it's really, I think, a super important aspect of it. Because it means that there are several aspects to the exhibition, all of which have some relationship to the curatorial. And the curatorial here means not the sort of simplistic classic, oh, I'm making a group show on the theme of water and I'm going to invite lots of artists who use water. I think that's the wrong idea here of curation. I think curatorial practice and I've run a master's in curating for a number of years with White Chapel Gallery in my own university. So a lot of discussion around curatorial practice, almost as an art practice. An artist like Goshka Macuga, for example, a really prominent Polish British artist, uh, who works almost exclusively as an artist through the notion of curation.

[00:32:06] Really interesting area of work, for instance. And so the kinship between artists and curators where it works is absolutely fundamental because it means that, first of all, I think you have a supporter and a friend. And when you're curating one-on-one, and I think this is quite different from when you're making a large institutional exhibition, which Nici and I have done where you're working with 20, 30 artists, et cetera. There, it's about being sensitive to what's required within the space and so on. Whereas when you're doing solo exhibitions or two handers, we just finished a show a few months ago in Portugal with two particular artists where we had to work very closely with them. the idea there is to strike up a relationship. and your question always has to be: what is the best for the event, the exhibition? What is the best for the artists? So I'm not suggesting that the producer, writer, curator, sacrifices themselves No, not at all. but you are an active agent within this relationship. And relationships are kind of difficult. They're kind of fickle. They're very different from artists to artists. So it really makes a difference. are you going to say hello? Nici is gonna come and say hello for a second.

[00:33:29] Anastasia: Great.

[00:33:30] Hi. How are you?

[00:33:33] I,

[00:33:33] Nicola Oxley: Very well, thank you.

[00:33:35] Anastasia: We were just talking about the role of curators in installation art.

[00:33:42] Nicola Oxley: Right.

[00:33:43] Um, think we always felt quite difficult to have that, that sort of title.

[00:33:48] Anastasia: why?

[00:33:50] Nicola Oxley: well, because in a sense, when we first started making exhibitions with artists, we found it such an integrated process that we didn't really think about what our role was, except that we were, you know, we started off as Nico studied some architecture and he also did some performance work. And I, I did find art at university and we just felt that we were working and wanting to work with artists just to see what happened in the process than being specifically saying that there was a separate role for us.

[00:34:27] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:28] Nicola Oxley: Because we actually enjoyed the fact that we felt that were all in it together and we just wanted to, I mean, Nico may have said that we had this grand idea 'cause we were very young at the time, that we would sort of make a Kunsthalle in London and that we would make this kind of integrated process where there was no financial involvement for anybody. we would do everything to kind of be together and work together. So that's why curating, it kind of has become something to us that is obviously there and is a part of the process. But it didn't start out like that really because at that point it was much more about having that kind of idea that there was, there was something that we felt that we wanted to work with and, and, and do.

[00:35:19] So that's why curating was the kind of word that wasn't really said very much either.

[00:35:24] Anastasia: Mm.

[00:35:25] Nicola Oxley: Whereas now it's very much a role and it's very much a part.

[00:35:29] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:35:30] Nicola Oxley: So feel as though it's kind of, it's been something that's evolved, that wasn't really to do with that kind process.

[00:35:38] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. And how do you find the artists and how do you decide who to work with, whose art to show in your space and so on?

[00:35:51] Nicola Oxley: That's always been quite an interesting thing because I suppose we, we, we got very interested in the process of working with artists. And at the time, because there was no internet, we did an awful lot of research in terms of finding artists because we, wrote a couple of books on on installation art.

[00:36:12] And we felt that it was a subject, especially when we were teaching that students kept saying to us, well, where are we gonna find information about these people? And what we really wanted to show was that there, there, not only worldwide, but there was a way of actually finding them. And so we did an awful lot of research. But we also wanted to show people that we felt, first of all, that we would work with and that the reciprocal arrangement would be that there will be something in it for them as well. So

[00:36:52] Anastasia: it's

[00:36:52] Nicola Oxley: a very odd thing to say, where did we find the artist? A lot of it was actually the artists coming and finding us.

[00:37:00] Anastasia: Oh really?

[00:37:01] Nicola Oxley: And so, and through that process we started to make decisions about not necessarily the kind of artists that we wanted to show, but the way that the artists would work within their practice became very important to us. So I think we've always worked in that sort of way that we weren't looking for people that would kind of either enable our career in some way, but were people that we really felt that there was an understanding and that we felt that it would be mutually interesting to work with each other.

[00:37:41] Nicolas de Oliveira: I think this question of, I mean, institutions generally have to represent. And they will need to show certain kinds of artists uh, support certain backgrounds, certain tendencies, et cetera. When you work in the way that we've done over all these years privately, it means that your responsibility ultimately is to art and to artists rather than the idea of representing uh, very broad constituencies.

[00:38:11] That said, for example we've always had a kind of 50-50 spread of men and women as artists. And these things weren't because there was a necessity for a rule or a particular quota, but it just seemed just, and it just seemed absolutely normal. So for us, when Nici's talking about this idea of finding us and we researching artists, it works both ways. And I mean, a lot of these decisions come out of knowledge, but a lot of them also come through happenstance. People would suddenly turn up and you'd realize that this person had been heavensent, this is exactly the one that you're looking for. Or sometimes you realize it kind of halfway through the project, the decision is actually a really interesting decision. And maybe artists also feel the same that way. I mean, we kind of believe in happenstance coming out of being there. You have to be there to be counted. That's really, really important. But once you're there and available, stuff happens that comes out of the work that you've already done. And hopefully this is a circle that highly sustainable.

[00:39:25] Anastasia: Yeah. And what does your writing process look like? Do you write together?

[00:39:30] Nicola Oxley: Yes.

[00:39:31] Anastasia: at the same time?

[00:39:35] Nicola Oxley: well you're, we're in the room that we actually use for writing. We have a very big table. I'm on one side, Nico's on the other. And it's a kind of role that we've developed is that we start with just looking for things that we feel. It's almost like a forensic investigation into how the artist works or feels or conversations. And through that kind of process, it develops. And thoughts and processes are written down by both of us. Then Nico is the person who actually puts the thing into a skeletal development so that you see a process and then you make it into a text.

[00:40:18] But then I will the text to him and we'll read it out loud, which we've found to be incredibly important to us. And through that process of actually reading out loud, we then develop editing and, and. But the process can take quite a long time. And we actually, again, through the way that we write, we kind of write because we want to write about the things that we write rather than being in a situation where we're just writing... we don't necessarily write things that we don't know anything about. So it's, very much a process that we keep. So I will say, as a good example, is an artist called Hans op de Beeck, who we know over long time

[00:41:09] Nicolas de Oliveira: whom you've interviewed.

[00:41:10] Anastasia: Who has been on this show before, yes.

[00:41:13] Nicola Oxley: Yeah. with Hans, when we first met him he was in a group show at our exhibition space. And he spent a lot of time in the corner doing lots of drawing, not really raising his head or speaking. He's very quiet. But we started to get really, really interested in him and his practice. And through that development of talking and, and just understanding what the work was, he asked us if we would do a large monograph on him of his work. And that actually meant for, I would say, very many years we've always been writing about him. And the process of that is an, I involve sort of involving process, but also a process that always stays very close to him as a person.

[00:42:05] Nicolas de Oliveira: the eminent American critic and writer, David Hickey says this wonderful thing that in order to write about art, you have to write about something else. And I think this has been one of those maxims that's been uppermost in our minds when writing about artists and artworks and making books and monographs and texts. Because we always said to the artist, well. It's not just about you. And I remember a certain moment where we put together a book on an artist called Stefan Bruggemann, a Mexican artist with whom we worked a long, long time and made several monographs on and stuff. And we were working with, we commissioned a really important writer called Chris Kraus. who also wrote amazing books, of auto fiction, such as I Love Dick. And she was an editor of Semiotics in New York and all that. And you know, she's one of those people that you look up to. And we were lucky enough to commission her to write on this particular artist. she wrote a beautiful text, which is very diaristic, very her own kind of way of working. And the artist looked at it and he said, but it's not about me. And we just fell about laughing and we said, well, hold on, it's not all about you, first of all. But the other thing to really understand is that in order to speak about somebody's work, the direct approach doesn't always work. The direct approach is the approach of a hack, not of a serious writer. Serious writers find a way around the subject and someone like Jonathan Lethem, for example, who's made an amazing book of his collected writings we have a pussycat in the room, come on, Percy. Um, He's often written for artists as an exchange. I'll give you a text, which is part fiction relating to your work and you give me a, a small drawing or something like that. And that's been a kinda relationship that he's had for many years. there's Percy, the gallery cat wandering around who has never ever touched an artwork, but he is very appreciative of, of art

[00:44:22] I'm just gonna let him out.

[00:44:23] Nicola Oxley: Okay. Nico's letting him out. so it's, it's just developed in the sense our writing in the terms of, again, it's not that we choose who we write about. But we, it seems that that happens. And through that we, we did an exhibition that had a kind of fictional publishing house. It was called Partial Fictions. And it was a bit mad because it was about 70 artists, writers, curators in the mix for three months. And in our relatively small space, it was constantly moving.

[00:45:02] So things were coming off the walls, other things were being removed, other people putting on performative pieces. Curators were coming in and we had vitrines that they, they were individually curating works in. And this partial fictions book, we invented the publishing house for it, which is Mulberry Tea Press. And from that we've written 14 books

[00:45:29] Anastasia: Wow.

[00:45:30] Nicola Oxley: of different artists, which are all about the artist. The generation of those books is, and this is where it becomes quite interesting for us, is because, sorry. Hello Percy.

[00:45:43] Anastasia: Hi.

[00:45:47] Nicola Oxley: Is from the, the fact that we also have done exhibitions. So we've curated exhibitions to which we have actually been paid. That money goes into a pot, and that pot pays for the production of the books.

[00:46:04] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:05] Nicola Oxley: Sometimes artists who work with different galleries or whatever will also pay for it. Sorry, this is this being a nuisance.

[00:46:16] Think out.

[00:46:18] Anastasia: I was actually gonna, that was my next question. How do these big projects, shows, and publications get funded?

[00:46:28] Nicolas de Oliveira: Well, there was a period in which we did a lot of fundraising. Because there, there are certain things that you simply cannot do unless you have significant funding. And in the days of Museum of Installation towards the end, I was spending most of my time trying to fundraise. And what this does, on the one hand, it makes you very central in a kind of art world, but it also has an impact on the very reason why you're doing this thing in the first place. And I think that brings its problems with it. And at a certain point we were offered an amazing space in Shoreditch in Central London, which is an old train station depot kind of thing. And Nici and I were standing overlooking this enormous hall. And looking at each other, we were with our architects thinking, is this for us? And we realized that was going to be the rest of our lives, dealing with a very large organization, spending most of our time fundraising, et cetera. And I think at that moment, something clicked and we thought, Hmm, this is gonna have such an impact.

[00:47:35] It's gonna change everything. And maybe that's not, the best thing to do. At which point I think things shifted a lot more from from making lots and lots of exhibitions to making less exhibitions, spending more time on the exhibitions, and conversely, doing lots more things like making books.

[00:47:54] And I think the books kind of in part were self-financing because we were having other jobs. I also worked as a consultant elsewhere. Nici's always worked in education. And so those things would support those activities. And that's a sort of blueprint that we've continued to this day in which the book production, as Nici has already explained is kind of part of a gift economy. we always make a certain number between three and 500 copies. They're pocket based, so they literally, we've measured this, they fit into your pocket. This is really, really important. Like an old fashioned penguin book, for example. The idea is that we encourage people to read about art, but actually to carry these things around with you.

[00:48:45] So this is the format that we work with. And so. The little books are just small things of beauty. And they're written by us and the artists together. Sometimes there's color, there's, there's very nice bits of paper um. Those sorts of things. And the artist gets a certain amount of them, and the artists sometimes sell them on their websites,

[00:49:12] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:12] Nicolas de Oliveira: or in bookshops, et cetera.

[00:49:14] We tend not to sell books because we prefer to engage in a gifting economy. In other words, our books circulate all around the world with people that we meet and the artists meet and you just go have a book. And because it's not a huge book, you can put it in your pocket and you can carry it around. And we used to do the very, very same thing with invitation cards with our first spaces, Unit7 gallery back in the eighties where we would hand make invitation cards out of all sorts of materials like asphalt, lead, plastic, ceramics, all sorts of things. And they were always fragments or responses to the exhibition made by the artist and made by us.

[00:49:59] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:59] Nicolas de Oliveira: So, somebody had an archive where they were collecting artist books and suddenly they produced these boxes in Antwerp, in Antwerp

[00:50:08] Nicola Oxley: of all places

[00:50:08] Nicolas de Oliveira: saying, oh, you are these guys who make these exhibitions because I have all your private view cards here for the last 10 years, and you think,

[00:50:15] Anastasia: Wow.

[00:50:15] Nicolas de Oliveira: how does that happen? And that's the kind of gifting economy also with the books that we really like to mind.

[00:50:22] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. Love that. Let's talk a bit about, something we touched on earlier, the art market and the place of installation art within that context. You know, like institutions, galleries, that the scale and the often ephemeral or site specific nature of installation versus the commercial side of art.

[00:50:48] Where does installation art fit in the art market?

[00:50:51] Nicolas de Oliveira: Well um, I, I think Nici and I are idealists. We are incorrigible idealists and we're, we're not moaning at all. It's just that we realize that there's different ways for different people to do stuff and there's different niches and the market occupies and ever-growing area but there's still niches for artists, independent producers, writers, et cetera, to function in.

[00:51:17] And sometimes this is actually in partnership with the market. So there are ways of working this in which it works for everybody. And the market itself in installation art, of course, back in the eighties when Nici and I started really didn't exist. I mean, Richard Wilson, for example, with 20:50

[00:51:35] That piece that's on the cover of our first installation art book, which we know helped his career immensely. But I think he sold that piece for less than 10,000 pounds to the Saatchis of the time. So this would be a kind of piece that you'd think, oh, that's priceless. And a lot of artists at that time when they were selling installations, they were selling 'em for very, very modest sums. Simply because nobody wanted to store the original material. And the idea of working with certificates, which of course is something that people like Sol Le Witt in the sixties and seventies pioneered, hadn't quite managed to get itself together at that period. Now it's very different. Now, of course, the artwork itself is often certificate based. Sometimes it's an edition anyway. It's also important to think that materials are perishable and can be replaced. So it's not about the physical things themselves often. It's about the idea, and that is part of the legacy of conceptual art, which actually for the market works in incredibly well because it means that you've got no storage issues at all. And the piece essentially is a set of instructions. And I know lots of artists have worked with this and commissioned works like Lucy Lippard with her amazing numbers shows and such like.

[00:52:57] Nicola Oxley: we've actually had this conversation recently with a friend of ours, a Norwegian artist who makes very, very, I mean, he, he's a painter as well as an installation artist. And he was asked to go back to a museum in, in Oslo. And they had three or four pieces of his, all of them were installation pieces. He found that they hadn't opened them from the day that his exhibition had finished. So they hadn't a clue what was inside the boxes. And they asked him if he could take everything out, reinterpret it for them. Because he's going to have an huge exhibition of his work. But they, they hadn't even taken it out of the boxes. And I'm sure that is happening a lot with work in certain points where it has stayed either archived somewhere, hopefully, well. Or, I suppose like us, who

[00:53:59] we

[00:54:00] would never say that we were going to keep the pieces of work. And in fact, we always said to the artists, the work is yours so you have a responsibility of it because we are not selling anything. so they would say, well, actually we take parts of it and we're working on pieces where this is appropriate and other parts of it are no longer appropriate. So we would have skip loads of certain things like wood go back to what it was. Or we'd try and say to art schools, do you want some materials? Because we have lots of material from a certain show. So that was another way of recycling certain parts of the work. But these things are, interesting because of when we were talking to our friend where he said it was interesting to him that they really didn't know what to do with the work.

[00:54:55] So he had to go in there. Luckily he's still around and he could do that. But then, as I said, there must be a lot of work that actually has that problem.

[00:55:05] Nicolas de Oliveira: I mean, for Hans op de Beeck, for example, who's just recently opened a gigantic exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, which covers, you know, like half the museum.

[00:55:19] Anastasia: Hmm.

[00:55:19] Nicolas de Oliveira: and he's the only contemporary artist that they've shown in a long, long time because it's all Flemish masters and such. And this parcours which is something like 30,000 square foot, it's just enormous. it's this immersive installation. Now, with that piece, the pieces actually came from his various warehouses dotted around Belgium, and he's always talked about the difficulty of keeping all that stuff. Because in his case, the things are literally sculpted.

[00:55:52] So it's not like he can chuck it all away

[00:55:54] Anastasia: Yeah.

[00:55:55] Nicolas de Oliveira: Because he works in this area of sculptural installation. So a lot of things are repurposed and remade in different configurations for then different museums, et cetera. Or certainly for exhibitions. For a museum piece that's going to stay, if you're working with perishable materials, it's a real problem.

[00:56:15] Mm. And lots of artists I mentioned at the very beginning when we started talking, the Italian Arte Povera artists were so influential, you know, Paolini, Pistoletto, all those people, they were making things out of essentially household paint and bits of paper and bits of old wood, a lot of which of course have perished dreadfully. So materials decay. And we also know that artists and seminal artists, like Eva Hasse for instance, none of the early latex pieces are ever exhibited anymore. All that's exhibited are pieces of work, which under the estate have been allowed to be reproduced for exhibition purposes only. Meanwhile, the old latex pieces are sitting, stuck together, all sticky in a, in, in a dark warehouse, you know, and that's life.

[00:57:12] Anastasia: Yeah, I've just had this problem. I was unpacking my storage space and discovered there was some water damage. So it's like, oh, great. Can I salvage this? Do I have to remake this? What do I do? You know, like,

[00:57:26] Nicola Oxley: I think there is certainly that problem. But I, I was thinking of Marcel Broodthaers Who we used on the kind of European set of books.

[00:57:36] Who suddenly became an installation artist 'cause it was the front of our book. And I thought, I don't, I don't know if he was an installation artist in the sense I thought. We chose him because we thought that he was a wonderful artist as process from being a poet to making artworks, ending up in a garage in London at one point where he had no storage anywhere. Neither did he have any money to actually store stuff. So there are always these amazing stories connected to how artists in the main make work, keep work, or if they sell it, what, becomes of it eventually. How it is seen. And I think that that in itself is something that because it is connected to consumerism or on the financial side of it, it becomes even more crucial to certain people that it is, it is authentic. I think that that is also another discussion, which is huge, about what is inauthenticity, when it was made, who it was made by, who actually intervened in the process of making. And with installations, a lot of them were made obviously by the artists, but a lot of people were actually well they worked with the artists to make the works as well.

[00:58:52] We

[00:58:52] Anastasia: Hmm.

[00:58:53] Nicola Oxley: had lots who worked with the artists on lots of pieces, lots of pieces that we needed to get technical advice on. We had lots of people coming in and helping the artists to do things. So there's a production team of people, like with Hans, need to be there to do that. But because he has a very particular view of his work, he's very much the fulcrum, the person on top of the whole thing, making sure that it is delivered as he wishes.

[00:59:23] And when we were talking to him, 'cause we walked through the exhibition with him in Antwerp and for us it's, it's very important for us to see how he has traveled through the art world. Because when we first met him, he was making very specific, much smaller pieces or large drawings would help to pay for the actual pieces that he was making.

[00:59:47] Anastasia: Hmm.

[00:59:48] Nicola Oxley: So I think these, these ways and understanding how artists work on ephemeral work. And how they should be delivered up is still a very big kind of,

[00:59:59] Nicolas de Oliveira: I mean, I think the same thing, the same thing can be said for, for other contemporary artists. Like we, worked with uh, a duo of Korean artists, Moon and Jeon, they're amazing, absolutely amazing. They showed at Documenta, they showed at Tate and various other organizations, and they make very large, they've built enormous sets and they did the Korean pavilion, for example, at the Vens Biennale. In order to do that, they replicated the entire Korean pavilion as a shell in a studio in Seoul, for instance.

[01:00:36] Anastasia: Wow.

[01:00:38] Nicolas de Oliveira: in order to photograph it and then in the real pavilion then project it, 'cause it, that's the only way that you could do it, because the pavilion is largely glazed. So they had to make a solid version to project on it, in order to re project. I mean, it's kind of complicated. But anyway, in their case, pieces of work were selling for a certain amount and the installations were generally editions of three, which was a film and the installation. But they could just about make ends meet. And they would say, oh, we are non-for-profit experimentational artist. And you're going, you're what? You're superstars. No, no, no. We can barely make ends meet. Because they didn't sell anything outside of those three versions of the work. Each one was something, I can't remember exact figures, but was maybe $150,000 or something like that.

[01:01:35] I can't remember, I mean, don't quote me. The production of these amazing films, I mean, they are like, you know, huge special effects movies that just happen to be 10 or 15, 20 minutes long. And as a result the artist is just about breaking even. So that's the sort of downside if you don't do anything else.

[01:01:58] Whereas someone like Hans op de Beeck on the other hand and lots of other artists sell large drawings or sell sculptures in order to fund these major, major installations. And the installations then, like his Art Basel, installation of the library,

[01:02:16] which is all this giant library in which people mill about and the library is gray.

[01:02:21] And the only color in the shot, and it looks really amazing on screen are t-shirts of the, the passes by in it. So a piece like that would be like a signature piece, and that signature piece means that it's supported by all the other work that an artist like that can sell. And there you need the both in order to make the whole enterprise function.

[01:02:48] Anastasia: Yeah, we were talking to Hans about this, how it's amazing that, you know, you kind of maybe do an installation. Maybe you have to fund part of the production yourself or, or you get a set artist fee. But then if the show is really popular and it has tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of visitors, the museum benefits from it. But the artist doesn't see anything of that. Like even though they are the ones who drew the crowd.

[01:03:23] Nicola Oxley: I think that's the problem. That's why I said about the, when we were talking to our friend about his pieces that had not been taken out of their boxes, not even checked by anybody for a very, very long time. I think there is a lot of responsibility that has to be given over to those museums to understand exactly the process that an artist has to go to make that piece that we saw in Antwerp actually work, function. And I think they've become slightly complacent with the idea when they set off to have something like that, that actually the responsibility of that is purely on the artist's shoulders.

[01:04:07] Anastasia: Mm.

[01:04:08] Nicola Oxley: I think that's something that Nico and I, I mean we're very small in the terms of any of those things, but we've always made it really clear to the artist that we will be with them through the whole process, from the point of beginning, which is perhaps a proposal of ,drawings to the ideas that they have, to the point where they enter the space because there's nothing in the space until they start building perhaps, or the things that they bring in. To staying with them through that process, helping them, making sure that it is as they wish it to be.

[01:04:43] And at the end of it, we always, always make sure that they have a very good record of the actual exhibition. .And the small book or whatever. So that is our part of the process that goes back to this idea of whether we look at ourselves as curators or where we fit within that. Because there is a kind of feeling nowadays that there's all these different compartments, you know, curators are one compartment, administrators of museums are others, but where is the artist in that process?

[01:05:22] Nicolas de Oliveira: I think this issue of, of the components that surround an event like an art exhibition where every component has its particular directive, everybody has their particular job. And after all, we live in highly specialist times. I mean, the jobs are more and more specialist, and yet at the same time, there's also a kind of onus for people to have a wider understanding of various parts. For us this seems incredibly obvious because in our case, this indistinction between curating, writing, producing, fundraising, hosting, cooking, chatting, all of those kinds of things are, are absolutely essential. In our terms, we do all of those. I'm not saying that we do all of them amazingly, but we do all of them as part of a complete package. And I think those kinds of things support artists in a way that institutions find very, very hard. Institutions because of their scale, are always in a situation where they're having to split up the jobs.

[01:06:35] That's completely understandable. But this is where smaller producers, smaller galleries, independent spaces, independent curators, I think really come to the fore. Because we are the kinds of individuals that have a lot of different skills that can be put at the service in co-production, in collaboration with artists. And this is one of the reasons why, I mean, to give you an example, we were working with one particular artist who was showing at Tate Modern at the same time in a large exhibition. And he was doing a very particular show with us. And people said, how on earth did you wrangle this guy?

[01:07:14] How did you get him? And the answer is very, very simple. Because we had, with SE8 Gallery, a very specific project, which is called the Vitrine Project for one year, in which we had built very large scale vitrines, three of them. Put them in the space, and artists were one at a time invited for a month to fill them. And so essentially they were making a new work, vitrine based. Now the artist, this was Ian Kiaer, jumped to this and said, this sounds like a great project. I'll do it. So in other words, if you offer something that's particular, that's really specific, it can work even with artists who have very little time or who are extremely well known, et cetera. And you have a kind of niche. And I think one of the really important aspects with what Nici and I have been doing sustainably over so long, is to always try and find a place where you can be as curators, writers, producers, and so on and so forth, but also where you can have an impact, you can support artists. All of that leads to, I think, an interesting practice.

[01:08:25] Anastasia: Hmm. Yeah, I think the kind of support you're talking about is vital, I would say, to making really good work as an artist. and it's rare when you do come across people who really understand the kind of process artists has to go through and the kind of support they might need along the way.

[01:08:51] Yeah.

[01:08:52] Nicolas de Oliveira: And also I think that there's artists of very different backgrounds, ages, and needs. And it's part of what you have to do when you kind of sensitize yourself to a process of work, that you're going to need to spend quite a lot of time with them. And time is one of the things that we have very, very little of today.

[01:09:12] That's one of the reasons why at a certain point we stopped doing lots of shows in a year in our spaces, but instead decided to do things that were much more um, time rich.

[01:09:25] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:26] Nicolas de Oliveira: Spending time with artists, letting them develop the pieces. And in fact, this really came to proper fruition. I mean, we'd already set it up, but the most salient example would be during the pandemic.

[01:09:38] During the pandemic, we were about to open with an exhibition of an artist who is um, collecting fossils from the river every day of the year. and we're very close to the river. It's an artist called Olivia Guigue and French.

[01:09:53] These, these are all manmade fossils. In other words, fossils from the Anthropocene. And had an archive of thousands and thousands of pieces, fossilized chewing gum and things like that. I mean, it's just extraordinary things. There you go. Here's some fossilized chewing gum.

[01:10:11] Anastasia: Great.

[01:10:12] Nicolas de Oliveira: You can just about see it. I mean, think about these things that have been sitting in the river for decades and have actually been inside the mouth of an individual. And she was basically building this museum piece in the space. Because we couldn't open the show for two years, she essentially used the space as her kind of archive. And she, from there, she would depart every day and she would then come back and in the yard she'd wash these pieces, dry them, then start cataloging them, and eventually this finally led to a show just after the pandemic was over. So this goes to show how sometimes the commitment is very, very long. We hadn't expected it quite that long, but there you go.

[01:10:52] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. What advice would you give an artist who's just starting out in the installation space?

[01:11:00] who's maybe like I emerging, trying to make installation art, unrepresented. What should they do? What's a good advice for them?

[01:11:12] Nicolas de Oliveira: Ooh.

[01:11:13] Nicola Oxley: I mean, in my terms, I suppose, because Nico said at one point that we both taught in art schools, and you are always on the kind of edge of not wanting to preempt what someone is going to expect from being through a course. You want them to really absorb it, to really immerse themselves into the idea of a practice. I think that that to me is something that they have to do. They have to really understand what their practice is. It's very, very interesting when you meet artists and you feel you know that that person is always going to be working, and to be an artist, despite whether or not they are represented by anybody.

[01:12:02] Nicolas de Oliveira: I'm, despite the context,

[01:12:03] Nicola Oxley: the commercial side of it,

[01:12:04] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:05] Nicola Oxley: but there is a driver there outside of all that. It's a bit like when we say that the people that we work with are obviously a little further along perhaps or far that process of understanding their practice.

[01:12:20] They know what their practice is. They're involved in their practice. But when we were certainly working with young students about it, we'd say: you have to really invest time looking at people's work, understanding work. You have to find things. You have to feel that you are very much in that as, as something that is very important to you and is going to be something you want to stay in. It could be that in a couple of years of leaving college, they end up by being teachers or they may completely change their idea, but they still are directed by what it was that they got from their training in some ways. So I don't know if there's an A to Z in that. I don't know if you start at a point and then it develops, because I think everybody that I've known, and I'm sure you know as well, are people that have had to go through all sorts of things to develop a practice.

[01:13:20] Nicolas de Oliveira: I mean this word practice, I think is really important that Nici is raising because if Nici's saying that practice comes first, then that means that outcomes come later. So it's like cart and horses, horses and cart, which comes first. And I think if you put the cart before the horse, you have a problem.

[01:13:43] In other words, if you put your desires of: I want to make a living out of art. If that's your kind of motivation, then that has certain consequences. If you're saying, I want to establish a practice, I think that has more longevity. Because whatever happens, if you simply want to establish a strong practice, you'll never be disappointed. Because practice isn't immediately about visibility. It's about yourself. It's about creativity. It's about making. It's about being in a kind of space by yourself, also sometimes with other people. That is a real driver. Everything else develops from there.

[01:14:21] And yes, of course, you're clearly right that there are strategies that you can employ. And one of the strategies that Nici and I have, have always employed is that you work together. Working together. I mean, one of the things that clearly kept us functioning is that there's two of us, I mean, whatever you do, there's two of us. Which on the one hand you might say complicates things. It does. But it also means it's sustainable. Because you feed off each other. And when there's two, there's three and four and five and six.

[01:14:54] And this idea of working with small numbers of people who are dedicated to a project is really, really key, I think, to smaller producers, independent galleries, and so on. Because that way you can rely on, in a sense, everything that's within reach. You know, put your arm out and see what you can touch.

[01:15:16] This haptic quality, I think is incredibly important. That you can rely on. From there, you've then built already a power base, and if you can move that power base to other spaces, other places, that's exactly what we did. And so we ended up doing shows all over the world. And that really makes sense to us.

[01:15:36] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:15:38] Nicola Oxley: I don't know. It sounds idealistic.

[01:15:41] Nicolas de Oliveira: It is.

[01:15:42] Nicola Oxley: But that we're not going to apologize for. Because in a sense that's, that's how we always have felt. I mean, it has not been an easy ride to say that you have an exhibition space. You have a kind of set of ideals of what you want it to stand up to. You want to produce certain things with it. You want to make sure that the artist has the materials that they needed. That there's no sense that they don't understand the process that they're in. All of that, if you don't have the money, relies on a huge amount of input in terms of time and energy to find all those things. And I think that's something that if anybody is setting themselves up into a career with something, would start to understand the amount of time and effort it takes. Going back to this idea of perhaps museums and maybe sometimes big commercial galleries, they want artists to perform. Perhaps they've forgotten that they also need a huge amount of, of help and support.

[01:16:48] So that reciprocal thing is something that Nico and I have always felt is absolutely key to everything that we do, whether in teaching, it's a reciprocal thing when you're sitting with, with students, talking to 'em about work. It feeds you as well, your understanding how they're thinking, what they're doing, how they look at the world. And that's something that through everything that we've done, Nico and I, that we've just been amazed by. Every time you start working with an artist, something crops up that perhaps you never even thought about they were gonna do. Maybe the good process is that we never demand that it is what they set out to be in a proposal.

[01:17:33] They can change anything at the time through us talking to them or going through stuff with them. And I think if somebody sets out to be in the path that we've been in, then they just have to, as Nico says, we've been very lucky. There are two of us. And in a way, which is also amazing, we can argue about whether or not we feel that one way of working is good or one way isn't. But we are resolute in the fact that what we do is for this project that we've set up, god knows how many years ago. So perhaps people have to also look for things that they find in galleries. I always used to say, you know, if you are interested in art, you should be visiting every gallery that you can put your nose into. Talking to people inside them. If you are really interested in it, make yourself a nuisance almost by going there and even saying you want to do some work there. Try to understand what it is. Because people will look at you and ask you, what do you know about us? And if they say, well, I've read a article in, you know, art review or something, that's not gonna be enough. So you have to really immerse yourself in the practice of making things and understanding it.

[01:18:49] Nicolas de Oliveira: this question, I mean, we've been talking about immersivity earlier on for the audience. And Nici's now brought in this question that artists immerse themselves in the art world as you know, active agents, producers. And this idea of immersion, I think is incredibly important because we live in a time when so much is second, third, fourth hand. you, you're not producing content yourself necessarily often, but you are simply retweeting, passing on, reenacting something. And I'm not suggesting that there is, I'm not going to harp on about originality, that's a whole other discussion. and I don't think it's a terribly interesting one, by the way.

[01:19:35] But I think it is very important to be somewhere where you have agency. Where you can touch stuff, you can do stuff, you can be close to people that you can speak to them. There's no point in saying, oh, I've heard so and so said that so and so did so and so. Well, no, that's gossip, that's hearsay. And it does not give you power, per se, unless you are at the Court of Louis IV kind of thing. And you are a whisperer. But rather, I think that in the work, one of the lessons from installation art is that installation art is massively hands on. There's lots of issues to be sorted out. Installation art is big. It requires bodies. You need to shift things. You need to do stuff. You need to have knowledge of the world. And the only way that you have knowledge of the world is that you touch it. And by touching, I mean physically, mentally, intellectually, emotionally. And you are in it and you are indeed immersed.

[01:20:42] Anastasia: Love that thought.

[01:20:44] Tell me a bit about some challenges you've had to overcome or maybe a challenge you're dealing with right now in your work.

[01:20:54] Nicola Oxley: I think something that we've always been really clear is, as Nico said, we're not doing as many shows as we used to. But that's quite an interesting choice. I mean, writing has become much more forefront of what we're doing. But we don't ever want to lose that idea of artists first and working with them on exhibitions. And within that, when we are now sometimes curating shows in different countries, that is a kind of challenge. It's a kind of thing because we are working in somebody else's house. Whereas normally, we have our own and we work ,within it and we know what we're doing. And so that too, that can be quite a challenge sometimes. Because we want to bring something, the last exhibition that we did in Lisbon, for instance, in a very large factory building that had been used as a distributor for newspapers. And we were invited to work with two artists. One of them we knew very well and one of them we didn't know very well at all. So the challenge for us is to make sure that we can meet that artist we don't know very well, to try and find out what on earth, whether we have anything in common. And whether it's a good idea for us to, to be even talking with each other about what the work is or whatever. And that doesn't mean that, I mean, we were very interested 'cause we looked through her work and, and thought about what she was doing in relationship to the, the artists that we'd worked with. But we were also looking at this strange space that was a gallery always and always used in a very particular way. So when Nico and I walked in there, we sat for a few days going in there and just thinking about it, measuring it. We spent days with the artists in their studios, asking them about their work, especially Tatiana. And then we had to bring that work or that idea of that work and get them to build what we wanted in the space.

[01:22:59] But the one thing we were really sure about is that we didn't want any of the lighting that was there. So we turned all the lights off.

[01:23:07] Nicolas de Oliveira: So essentially we turned the white cube into a black cube and then started to add individual lights. And we consulted with one of the lighting engineers from Pearl Jam, who is an ex student of ours.

[01:23:22] Anastasia: Nice.

[01:23:23] Nicolas de Oliveira: and he, and he very graciously said, actually, here's some really simple things that you can do. And so essentially we lit all the pieces of work in an individual manner using theatrical black wrap and making the whole thing quite. Well, it turned the whole space into something immersive. All the works didn't function the way that they might have worked in a white cube at all, even though they were discreet artworks in themselves. And the whole thing then benefited also from a beautiful soundtrack uh, which is put together by one of the artists also. So the whole thing became a, an immersive space.

[01:24:00] Nicola Oxley: So the combination was, first of all, we took the light away, which made everybody very confused and buzzled. But we said, well, the main people who we're really touching in this are the artists. So we, we had a long meeting with them and said, do you agree with us doing this? And both of them said, we trust you. I said that will be interesting to see how that evolves. So we went through it.

[01:24:27] But we like the idea of using this very fine lead wrapping to take an ordinary light bulb and just turn it into this point, or to allow it to just light a above a piece of work.

[01:24:43] Nicolas de Oliveira: not the piece of work. It's a little bit like tickling the piece of work.

[01:24:46] Nicola Oxley: Yeah. It's just so that there was a shadow You've got something on your back wall, where there's that thing that you just feel that the light is coming in somehow from somewhere else.

[01:24:57] Nicolas de Oliveira: And the pieces of work essentially have a kind of aura as it were, rather than being lit in a flat dead way, which works amazingly in the white cube. But that's not the experience we were after. We were after the opposite. No. Something that had something an allegoric kind of nature where the gallery became like the kind of church, in a sense, contemporary work became medieval, even though it was the opposite of all of those things.

[01:25:28] So the idea was to make a kind of experience and it worked incredibly well.

[01:25:32] Nicola Oxley: I think it was also something where people came and they were very familiar with it as the gallery was. And that was one of the things that we really wanted to battle with. 'Cause we thought, we are not familiar with this space. But we are familiar with space. And what we really want to do is hold these works within that space by removing the one thing that is in the way, which is this artificial lighting everywhere.

[01:25:59] Yeah, so when you say, everything becomes quite critical when you're doing things like that because luckily the artists really wanted to work with us and we took them through the process. And as we were hanging each piece that they had, or we selected all the things and put them together, we know that we have to spend the time it takes with each of the artists. We're not there for an hour. We are there for five hours. We are wanting to go through the work that surrounds that work that we've chosen. So the artist feels that we're really taking them on. We're not just showing the work. So 10 days of that is incredibly intensive.

[01:26:47] Anastasia: Mm.

[01:26:47] Nicolas de Oliveira: Especially if you are working in Lisbon heat. Yeah. You know, the, they're sort of frayed minds and, and everybody gets a little bit frazzled. But that's the sort of experience. And when something is not your house and you don't have the routines that you have, because I think some of the routines you actually need in order to sustain yourself mm-hmm.

[01:27:06] Then it can become very, very wearing. And when you come off that, you get a real buzz, you're also very exhausted. And after that you really have to go and go and lie in a dark room. And I think that's always been the case.

[01:27:22] Anastasia: That's why you took the lighting off.

[01:27:25] Nicolas de Oliveira: I, I think so. Exactly. Exactly. But, but equally, I think this question that we touched upon earlier on around documentation became really interesting because the photographer that we hadn't worked with before in Lisbon, he kind of came and started to take some photographs and we had to instruct him very specifically. And actually luckily, he instantly understood that he realized, ah, you want me to take the photographs not the way that the camera sees it, but the way that the human eye sees it. And this was really perspicacious of him. Why? Because if you shoot a photograph of our show with an iPhone, for example, It looks like there's a lot of light in the space. The iPhone bumps up light like anything, whereas the naked eye perceives the space as very dark. So as a documentary photographer of that exhibition, he shot beautiful photographs. It really stopped the light down to very, very little and made the pieces really sing and that function and far be it from us to massage what was in the space. But sometimes in order to provide the real experience, you actually need to modify something. You need to simulate something just slightly.

[01:28:44] Hans, by the way, does this in terms of the photographs of some of the installation pieces and some of the installation pieces, there are angles that as a visitor to the exhibition, you'll never, ever see. But he stages them from a different location and it really, really works. And it helps when you're seeing the piece remotely. Because

[01:29:06] Anastasia: Mm.

[01:29:07] Nicolas de Oliveira: you cannot replicate the experience of being in the space. you have to part-fictionalise it in order to give a true rendition of what it might have felt like to be in the space. And so, for example, when we made an exhibition in um, this is a big retrospective that we made in a museum in Berlin. where we invited to present our collection, our collection of what? Collection of documents of installation, art. And essentially we turned up with a series of, of large brown cardboard boxes.

[01:29:44] And the museum was kind of going like, and where's the work? And we just said, wait and see. And so out of this we unearthed something like a thousand pieces of stuff. Some were fragments of installations that kind of unfolded. Photographs, immersive sound showers. Everything was kind of revealed out of it. And the museum was completely full. Because it was like a show made up out of hundreds and thousands. There was so much detail there. And the one thing that we omitted was any signage. So we said, and the Germans were at first aghast at this, they were saying, you know, where are the signs that tell us what's what.

[01:30:26] And we said, what we're building here out of our archive is an installation of the archive built by the curators. We also invited

[01:30:35] Anastasia: Wow.

[01:30:36] Nicolas de Oliveira: several artists who had worked with us throughout the years to make responses to the works that they'd previously made.

[01:30:45] So there are also new works or adapted works in the exhibition. So the detail was such that the only thing that guided you around the space actually were a series of, of sound showers that Nici had built with a sound engineer, which guided you sonically around the space so that you heard the voices of artists. The showcase that we utilized were also micd up, where if you put your ears close to them, you could hear the artists speaking, but if you were away from them, it was a completely silent space. So it's using tactics like that to make works that no longer existed available. Because essentially it was a complete retrospective.

[01:31:26] Anastasia: Sounds like a very meta exhibition.

[01:31:29] Nicolas de Oliveira: oh, very much so.

[01:31:31] Nicola Oxley: We called it a book of burning matches.

[01:31:33] Nicolas de Oliveira: So it's, it's this kind of stuff.

[01:31:36] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[01:31:37] Nicolas de Oliveira: And we collaborated with a guy called David Price, who is an artist who we'd shown, who's also an amazing writer. he does this amazing substack life writing work currently out of Stockholm. But he essentially put together the book with us as three writers. And essentially what happened was this coming together of something that was a storage project. Because an archive is a storage facility, if you think about it. And how to turn storage into story.

[01:32:11] And this is once again, what we have to do next year in an institution in Lisbon where they've asked us to kind of reprise this. And the idea is to make a redux version of that. And the redux version of that, we still don't know exactly what it's going to be, we sure as hell not shipping all that stuff back over. But we're actually making a particular piece of work in relation to it.

[01:32:35] Anastasia: Mm-hmm. And if you could have a magic wand and do anything anywhere with anyone, what would be a dream project for you?

[01:32:48] Nicolas de Oliveira: Whoa.

[01:32:50] Nicola Oxley: I mean, I could think in terms of if I'm, if I had to select an artist that I would really like to meet. He's not alive, so. But think sometimes it would be nice, I suppose, to have the dream of the fact that we do have an extensive archive and to be able to actually take the time and spend the time and, and exhibit it perhaps. I think in terms of who. I don't know, I mean of who would we show?

[01:33:24] Nicolas de Oliveira: Well, I think we, we were asked this a few years ago in an art fair to select favorite pieces.

[01:33:32] Nicola Oxley: Oh yeah. From the art fair.

[01:33:33] Nicolas de Oliveira: From the art fair, that kind of thing. And that, that was a lot of fun. Because you can select an object.

[01:33:40] To work with an artist, it's not necessarily just about their work, but it's actually about them. And I think dead or alive, I think Nici and I would've had a lot of trouble with, and would've loved to have worked with Marcel Broodthaers because this, I mean, a complex character, difficult man, very inspirational. Something between an installation artist and the poet. very, very interesting. And I think that there are so many artists that you sort of look up to and so many writers that you look up to. But ultimately it's not about a sort of hero worship. Ultimately, I think it's about making your own luck and making relationships that are productive, not just for you, but also for the other person.

[01:34:33] Because this is always one of our concerns. We know what's in it for us, but what's in it for you? And it only works if there's something in it for you, the artist that is. Or the person that we're collaborating with, because otherwise it doesn't feel true.

[01:34:49] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[01:34:51] Nicola Oxley: It's odd because when you were asking us how did artists come to us, through the process of, of them just arriving in a, in a weird sort of way, not... I mean, there's been some sadness with certain people that we have worked with who died very young. And if you could kind of have stretched it and made it possible for them to really have shown what they were capable of.

[01:35:20] Nicolas de Oliveira: Artists such as Lucia Nogeira, for example, the Brazilian artist who made one of the most, we loved her work, amazing pieces.

[01:35:28] Nicola Oxley: She, she showed with us and, you know, to, to die when she was in her early forties was just crazy. And also an artist that we, we wrote a book on or we were in the process. He was just getting to the point where his work was really taking off. And he died in India.

[01:35:46] Nicolas de Oliveira: His name was Patrick Jolly

[01:35:48] Nicola Oxley: and he was most amazing artist,

[01:35:51] Nicolas de Oliveira: filmmaker, and installation artist. And the films were installations. And the installations were films.

[01:35:57] Anastasia: Wow.

[01:35:58] Nicola Oxley: So I'm, you know, if I could pick up both of those two and just think about what they had ahead of them. I would say that they, they were very, it's I suppose in another kind of form I can look at someone like Hans.

[01:36:12] I mean, we've known him for many years. And just to see the journey that he's been on and be part of it. I think that's, that it's, we have met some really interesting artists. We've met some really famous artists. But it's the ones that stay with you could be like we are saying about David, who helped us to, organize and put together and think about, and, and write about our archive. I mean, he's an extraordinary person. So I don't have any dreams of anyone that I want to show particularly, but I would like to kind of bring them back.

[01:36:53] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[01:36:54] Nicola Oxley: and certain people in place again. 'cause that, that is just not fair that they went so soon.

[01:37:00] Nicolas de Oliveira: Also, I think, there was a time when we were doing lots of conferences. Mm-hmm. And we also hosted a whole set of things. We hosted in this amazing space in Mexico on the west coast. Where we managed to sequester away 20 different people, artists, curators writers and so on. And we kind of handpicked people. Yeah. And it was an amazing kind of think tank. And those are moments where you think, oh, it's like a candy store. Who should we pick? That kind of stuff. Mm-hmm. But equally, I remember a really distinct moment many years ago where we were invited to a museum in Germany during the Museum of Installation Times, and we were the kind of kids on the block. And part of the conference, and this was like a three day conference the way that the Germans used to organize them. And everybody's in the same hotel and there's good cheer to be had. Sitting right next door to us, giving us wake up calls where people like Joseph Kosuth. Or then there'd be Hal Foster that you'd have tea with. There'd be Komar and Melamid who'd be kind of going like, yeah, hey kids, let's go and have a drink. Or there'd be Hans Haacke, you know, Hans Haacke, the sort of famously grumpy but really interesting and rather lovely German conceptual artist. And they're the sort of people that you, at the time you really look up to and you're sort of pinching yourself. But then we were the kids then, well, we're not the kids now. I think the enthusiasm for that never goes away. But there comes a point where you kind of realize, oh, maybe you become those people that people say, oh, there's those three people. You know,

[01:38:40] Anastasia: Yeah, I think so.

[01:38:42] What are you working on right now if you can share?

[01:38:45] Nicola Oxley: Yeah. We're in the process of writing a text on somebody who has a wonderful space in Lisbon. It's for, a museum so it's a text that we're writing for the museum, but there's still that sense that we want to really show how he has helped and, and put together the most amazing shows and collected. He's a collector, which is also an unusual kind of thing for us to do.

[01:39:13] Nicolas de Oliveira: And simultaneously we're working on another collection, which is actually specifically about the House of a Collector, which is not a house, it's a flat. He's a very interesting man. He's not a man who comes from means at all, now has one of the strongest collections in Lisbon of contemporary art, cutting edge contemporary art. And so we're making a book with him about essentially his house and the way that he essentially curates within his house. It's a very specific thing. And we're also working

[01:39:46] Nicola Oxley: with two artists, Norwegian artists, and they don't normally work together. They're partners, but they don't normally work together. She has spent maybe three or four years most of her time in the Arctic Circle at a big quarry where she's been getting them to take various lumps of amazing stone. Usually she made film work or she made sound work and now she's started to use stone. So she's, she is coming with her partner. And he is somebody who makes, he never, he never travels very far and he certainly has never shown in London before. And he started off with how many personas?

[01:40:29] Nicolas de Oliveira: He used to make work under seven different personas and each persona made completely different work.

[01:40:36] Anastasia: Wow.

[01:40:37] Nicolas de Oliveira: and. But he's not, he's not schizophrenic at all. But he would just invest himself in these different characters who had very different skills. Some were painters, some made installations, some made, you know, conceptual artworks, et cetera. And he's somebody that we've worked with before. We managed to immerse ourselves in his studio for 10 days or something like that.

[01:40:59] Nicola Oxley: We stayed there. So he said you have full run of my studio. And it was like an aircraft hanger, the size. And when you went in there, there were all these different rooms, different areas. One of them had like a, an airlock door that you had to really push open. And it was a complete sculpture studio with plaster And and then you go into another one and there were these huge canvases, paintings and stuff. And another one had enormous pieces of installation work that were of figures and talala.

[01:41:38] And we found out that his family were skydivers. that he is much smaller than, he said, his brothers. So he couldn't quite, he wasn't strong enough. So they would all jump out of the planes and they'd be looking at the everywhere. And so

[01:41:53] Nicolas de Oliveira: made these big install. One of his characters made these big installations it's like, of landscapes and tiny things placed in these landscapes as if seen from above, as if seen from flying above the earth as you're descending at 200 miles an hour. Because he did do, he said something like 50 jumps and he said every single one of them scared the life out of him. Because when you are skydiving, you're essentially diving for that period without a parachute. Until your parachute opens and then you have to do a series of figures before the parachute.

[01:42:31] So he said I was just dying every time. Yet out of that came immersive installation. So there you go. So that's something else we're working on.

[01:42:40] Nicola Oxley: But also he asked us to write something about him in a book that he was making and we decided to write a fiction. So we called it The Coat, and we, we built a story about being in this amazing place for 10 days through characters. So essentially

[01:43:02] Nicolas de Oliveira: each one

[01:43:03] Nicola Oxley: inhabited there of

[01:43:03] Nicolas de Oliveira: the works is a catalyst for a kind of set of writing. So everything is really documentary. It's a documentary fiction. It's based exactly on the works, but it's a kind of interpretation of what those works are, what they might be. And of course, this is entirely without the say so of the artist.

[01:43:24] And after, afterwards we came back to London, wrote the thing, a few months later sent it to him and he was making a very, very large book with several texts in it. And we just didn't hear from him. And eventually we kind of phoned him and I said is something the matter? And he said, I've got a real problem.

[01:43:43] I said, what with the text? He said, no. With all the other texts, I want to start the book again. I want to chuck them all out. I just want this text. And how on earth did you know the stuff that you wrote about? Because it's all true. and we're thinking

[01:43:56] Anastasia: Wow.

[01:43:56] Nicolas de Oliveira: Well, maybe it's... well immersion again.

[01:44:00] Nicola Oxley: We also did with Hans, we, we went to Rome, he had a big opening. And he's not the best at doing public speaking. And at this stage, he asked Nico to do a kind of introductory talk. So I was sitting on the steps with him and another friend of ours, and afterwards he said, oh I'm gonna, ask you if you could write a fiction for a book that I'm doing on a film. I thought, oh, not again. 'cause fiction is, it's very hard. It's really, really hard. It takes a lot of energy and, and it is just amazing. Anyway, so he said, oh, he said, no, no, no. It's your writing, I'm making the film and we'll meet and let's see what happens, see if it goes together. So we had a year to actually do it, which is good.

[01:44:53] Nicolas de Oliveira: And the result was: he presented us with the project, which is this amazing CGI film. All we knew was that it was about an ocean liner. A luxury ocean liner.

[01:45:05] Nicola Oxley: Yeah. Sea of Tranquility.

[01:45:06] Nicolas de Oliveira: We named it the Sea of Tranquility. And that became the name of the show. And we meanwhile wrote this novella, which we called Sand, and eventually we did a swap and we realized how much we are in each other's heads, which is always gratifying. And eventually the whole thing was an exhibition and with a very large book. And our book exists as a, as a digitally produced inside of the book. So it really worked beautifully. And he made some special illustrations also for this virtual book inside the book of books.

[01:45:44] Anastasia: I love that multilayered process.

[01:45:47] Nicola Oxley: it's very important to us.

[01:45:49] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[01:45:49] Nicola Oxley: always everything. We're very curious. Everything, yeah, curiosity. If something is sound or if it's making even with Ole and Merit. I love the fact that we're working with a, a couple who have separate studios, have separate lives in terms of the thing, but they are always helping each other. When he needs something, she will work with him and, and then he, vice versa, will go and spend some time with her in the Arctic Circle and. I think it's, it's lovely for us because then it's a sort of reciprocal thing of us as a couple where you pick up when somebody gets tired or you, you take something further.

[01:46:34] And it's the same when we're writing sometimes it's like that. you've got lots of ideas or you're thinking about how this is appropriate for what is happening in terms of what the artist is doing, how it works. It's wonderful because we can talk about it.

[01:46:49] Anastasia: Hmm.

[01:46:50] Nicolas de Oliveira: Exactly.

[01:46:51] Anastasia: Yeah. Last question is a question that I have been asked myself and I try to answer, but I don't know if it's possible. What is installation art? Or maybe easier to answer What is not installation art?

[01:47:09] Nicolas de Oliveira: I think there was a time where this really, really mattered. And I think at the time at which it was established as a term and as we've narrated, we are very much part of the firming up of that term, the story of that term. At the time it was very much connected to ideas about space and site specificity.

[01:47:32] But that was in the eighties. And site specificity became the USP in a sense of installation art as it was casting around to try and make a space for itself. I don't think that that's that important anymore because we're beyond those kinds of classifications. In fact, when we were making the first Installation Art book, a lot of people would ask us for a definition. And then they'd say, but surely the caves at Lascaux with the cave paintings are also installations. And our answer at the time was, no they're not. They're made by cave people who had no notion of what art was. And that's a discussion which is really kind of specious. Installation art comes out of modern and then contemporary art. It has a very particular legacy and it has many forefathers and -mothers.

[01:48:29] And they go back to the kind of crazy sculptural environments made by that postman inside his, his strange house in France in the 1910s or whenever it was. It has connections to land art, it has connections to conceptual art. It has so many kind of ramifications. I mean, there's a whole study there, of course, and the whole history. And so we know where it's coming from. What we don't know is where it's going. And I think that's the more interesting area, you know. Where is this driving towards?

[01:49:09] Because I don't think that this immersive issue, which we've been talking about, has been resolved by the over commercialization of immersive spaces, which are actually just rather lame commercial productions of people standing in front of things, making shapes that then they become birds and what have you. I think at the moment there's a whole other economy that's not really part of the art world at all, but that's to do specifically with the entertainment industry, which is actually conceptually and contextually very, very weak.

[01:49:42] That said, of course there are artists, and I would include Hans op de Beeck in this by the way, as well as, you know, Christo and Jeanne Claude and Ilia Kabakov and, there are all, all those artists who are very much part of the art world and they are making very immersive pieces. And I think in the right kind of way, where there's a demand made on the audience, not just to kind of find themselves, but the artwork has a presence. And I think this is really important in installation art. We realized with our second book, the Empire of the Senses Installation Art two, that yes, there was something really important about the participation of the audience, the place of the audience, but that was 20 years ago, the second book. And so as a result, all those years later, we are now in a position where we can say with some confidence that unless there's an artwork that has a strong presence, then it's not installation art at all. It's something else. It's a branch of the entertainment industry.

[01:50:50] I think the audience should not think that they are alone. When you walk into a space and you see an amazing installation, it is you who witnesses it. This is powerful medicine. You are there. This is a physical experience. Very, very important. you are not alone because the artist is present through the artwork and the space is also present. And you need all of those things in order to realize that position of installation art. And I think that's, that's really essential, that there must be art. There can't just be audiences.

[01:51:31] And various artists have talked about the return to contemplation. The idea that you can be in a space and contemplate something, in the way that you might have contemplated, maybe a jot of fresco in Assisi .Or to sit in the Rothko room and to contemplate those paintings. And there is something there that I think mustn't be forgotten about when we're looking at contemporary installation art. It has those qualities. They are quite transcendental. They're quite, dare say it, you know, with a very small s spiritual. But they're not just about you. They're about you and your position in a world of culture.

[01:52:19] Nicola Oxley: Boom boom

[01:52:21] Anastasia: Great. Well. Thank you guys. I've taken up a lot of your time already, so I'm super conscious, but I'm sure there would be so much more, I have more questions, but maybe, maybe we'll do a part two at some point. Um, meanwhile, uh, tell the listeners where can people find out more about your work? Where can they maybe find your space, your books, your next projects? Where should they go?

[01:52:52] Nicolas de Oliveira: Okay. The easiest thing, and it's very partial, finding stuff about us is not as easy as it would seem. Basically because we spend very little time on either social media, proselytizing and so on. We do have a website of the gallery space which is se8.gallery so that's very straightforward.

[01:53:17] Anastasia: Mm-hmm.

[01:53:18] Nicolas de Oliveira: Our books can can be accessed to a very limited extent, because we're working on that at the moment, through the gallery space as well. Meaning, the specific books to do with Mulberry Tree Press, which is our small imprint. What else?

[01:53:35] Nicola Oxley: I dunno, all the other stuff with Hans and people existed

[01:53:41] Nicolas de Oliveira: with the artists like Stefan Bruggemann, Hans op de Beeck Yeah, at Hauser & Wirth, those kinds of things. To us that's a job for somebody else. And the various galleries that we've collaborated with, foundations, Leao Rios Foundation in Portugal, for example. What else? Me Collection in Berlin, dialogue Gallery in Lisbon. Forthcoming another archival show at Appleton in Lisbon as well.

[01:54:11] Anastasia: When is that on?

[01:54:13] Nicolas de Oliveira: That'll be on in October

[01:54:15] Anastasia: mm-hmm.

[01:54:16] Nicolas de Oliveira: but before that, there'll be book launches and various other things, a lot of which are happening in either London or Lisbon. 'cause they're the two cities that at the moment we seem to be operating in. But there'll be others. And we come and we go.

[01:54:31] Nicola Oxley: But our space is in a small part of southeast London called Deptford. And we have a small building and if anybody ever knocks on the door, then they're welcome.

[01:54:44] Anastasia: Okay

[01:54:45] well, I'll put the link to the gallery in the show notes so people can go and check it out. We mentioned just earlier that it's been now over 20 years since your second installation art book. Is a time for volume three?

[01:55:03] Nicola Oxley: Uh, I don't know. I mean, we were hoping that somebody else would take up the baton and run with it. it's interesting. It was very interesting to do the second one because the first one was us literally with no internet or anything. So everything had to be sent. So all the slides Oh, that wonderful word.

[01:55:28] Nicolas de Oliveira: Yeah, talked about that.

[01:55:29] Nicola Oxley: So you've talked about that. So, so there was that wonderful kind of moment when everything would arrive and we'd had letters from artist et cetera. It seems that the world is, is almost so broad and wide. But maybe. It's not something that we've necessarily thought that much about, but I think it could be something we could consider doing. I think there are lots of things we could say about it and there are lots of examples and artists that we could talk about.

[01:55:58] Anastasia: Yeah.

[01:55:59] Nicola Oxley: So it's whether or not it becomes something that is attached to something else. Like I was saying to you, there's a, a kind of thing of saying that with the, the archive that we've got, which is based on all the installations that we've done. Maybe that is also a place that, that could, because we do want to turn into a book.

[01:56:19] Nicolas de Oliveira: Yeah. I, I think that that's exactly the point. That the next installation art book for us actually is surrounding surrounding. the practice that Nici and I have had as producers for the, the last three and something decades. So really it's around a more personal narrative rather than to once again represent and summarize.

[01:56:43] Because in a sense we've sort of done that. And I think, yes, it is timely to say, as you suggest that there's probably time for another book on installation art. But I think the fear is that in somebody else's hands, it could easily become something that simply celebrates a kind of vacuous immersivity and says it's immersive for everybody and everything is happy clappy. When in fact what it really needs is a recalibration. Maybe we'll do it, but I think it's more likely to be a much more personal narrative to try and summarize what it is that we've done and the experiences that we can rely on are truthfully firsthand. Mm-hmm. And involve the hundreds of artists that we've worked with over the past few decades.

[01:57:37] Nicola Oxley: Yeah, I think there's about 400 that we can say that we've worked with. So I mean, that's a book

[01:57:42] Anastasia: Oh yeah. It's a thick book. Yeah.

[01:57:46] Nicolas de Oliveira: And that one will need fundraising.

[01:57:49] Nicola Oxley: Yeah. If we want to do it the way we want to do it. Yes.

[01:57:54] Anastasia: Well, I'm looking forward to the next developments.

[01:57:58] Nicola Oxley: It's been very nice to talk to you.

[01:58:01] Anastasia: Yeah, you too. Thank you so much for taking the time.

[01:58:04] Nicola Oxley: I'm sorry I have a very bad cough. I didn't expect I was going to come and speak, but it's been very, very interesting talking to you.

[01:58:11] Anastasia: Well, I'm, I'm very glad you joined us.

[01:58:20] That was Nicola Oxley and Nicolas de Oliveira, based in London. What a powerhouse duo in the world of installation art. You can learn more about their exhibition space SE8 by visiting SE8.gallery. That's s se and number eight dot gallery, and I highly recommend seeking out their books.

[01:58:44] Links to those as well as everyone mentioned in this episode are in the show notes and on our website, installationartpodcast.com.

[01:58:53] And before you go, I have an update. there's been a big new development regarding the topic discussed in our bonus episode 31 about the Australian Venice Biennale Pavilion debacle that I spoke to with Carrie Scott. Just today came out the announcement from Creative Australia that artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino, have been reinstated to represent Australia in the 2026 Art Biennale. And I could not be more happy to hear this news.

[01:59:29] Personally, I think that was the only correct move on Creative Australia's part. So I'm glad to hear that they did the right thing in the end. Took a while, but we got there.

[01:59:41] Perhaps they changed their mind after hearing the installation art podcast episode. Just kidding, but still a win for installation art, and I'm looking forward to seeing the project that they create, hopefully in person who knows.

[01:59:58] That's it for me for today. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend or maybe a bunch of your friends by sharing it on social media. This really helps us reach more people who are interested in installation art.

[02:00:15] Thank you for tuning in, and until next time.