Nicolas Bourriaud, born in 1965, is a curator and writer. He founded and Codirected the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, (1999 -2006), was the founder advisor for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev (2003-2007), professor at the IUAV in Venice (2006-2007), Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London (2007/ 2010). In 2010, he headed the studies department at the Ministry of culture in France, then became Director of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-arts de Paris ( 2011 -2015). Between 2015 and 2021, he founded and directed MO.CO (Montpellier Contemporain). In 2022, he funded Radicants, a curatorial cooperative producing exhibitions worldwide. Translated worldwide, his essays on contemporary art include « Relational aesthetics » (1998) and « Inclusions. Aesthetics of the capitalocene » (2020).
As an independant curator, he was part of the curatorial team of Aperto 1993 at the Venice Biennial, and organized many international exhibitions, from « Traffic » (Capc Bordeaux, 1996), « Estratos » (Murcia, Spain, 2008) or « Altermodern » (Tate Britain, 2009), « Wirikuta/ Mexican time slip » (Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2016), « Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime » (Venice, 2022), and more recently « 1+1. The Relational years » (MaXXI, Rome, 2025). He also curated several biennials, including Lyon (2005), Moscou (2005 and 2007, with Rosa Martinez, Daniel Birnbaum, Joseph Backstein, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Iara Boubnova), « Monodrome » (Athens, 2011), « The Great Acceleration» (Taipei Biennial 2014), « Threads » (Kaunas Biennial, Lituania, 2015), « The 7th continent » (Istanbul biennial 2019), « Pansori. A soundscape of 21st century » (Gwangju Biennale, Korea, 2024).
In collaboration with BO – The Association of Visual Artists Oslo, The Tehran Summit proudly announces the lineup for its fifth edition, titled “Of the City of Na-Koja-Abad.” Fusing Calvino’s Invisible Cities with Shahab-Al Din Suhrawardi’s Illuminationist philosophy, the fifth edition of The Tehran Summit turns toward the concept of nationhood—not as a border, but as a fiction continually rewritten in the deserts of Na-Koja-Abad: that imaginal, luminous space “of nowhere” where metaphysics and materiality converge. This edition invites artists, thinkers, and scholars to map the interzones between myth and state, belonging and exile, visibility and disappearance. How might we inhabit multiple worlds at once? How can art perform the labor of speculating worlds that do not yet exist or that remain dormant within the cracks of dominant reality?
Scheduled from May 18–24, the audience is invited to a series of talks by distinguished practitioners exploring entangled layers of geography, imagination, time, and space. Unfolding as a collective act of world-building, Of the City of Na-Koja-Abad is a gathering across geographies, languages, and temporalities. It proposes a nation without walls, an unfinished cartography where voices resonate like distant cities across the sand: cities made of air, mirages, and light.
About The Tehran Summit
Co-founded by Erfan Ghiasi and Ghazel in 2022, the Tehran Summit is an annual online event that takes place each May during the absence of the Sun in the Middle East. Emerging from the same cultural soil that once nurtured the Shiraz Arts Festival (1967–1977), a revolutionary meeting point for global avant-garde artists, The Tehran Summit continues that spirit of experimentation and exchange, yet transforms its framework to respond to contemporary realities of Iran.
About Bo
BO – The Association of Visual Artists Oslo is an artist union and exhibition space for contemporary art. Through promoting the work of established and emerging artists, BO’s artistic program is dedicated to strengthening and supporting a vibrant art scene in Oslo. Since its establishment in 1976, BO has held a key position in the artistic ecosystem of Oslo, fostering a space where the free, inclusive, and social potential of art can thrive beyond and outside of capitalist market conditions.
Acknowledgements
The fifth Tehran Summit has been made possible with the generous support of the Fritt Ord Foundation and the Arts Council Norway.
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