Clémentine Deliss is a curator, publisher and cultural historian. She studied contemporary art and semantic anthropology in Vienna, Paris, and London and holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London. In 2016, she initiated and curated the Dilijan Arts Observatory, a transdisciplinary fieldwork gathering in a former electronics factory called Impuls in Dilijan, Armenia. Between 2010–2015, she directed the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, instituting a new research lab to remediate collections within a post-ethnological context.
Exhibitions she curated at the Weltkulturen Museum include Object Atlas – Fieldwork in the Museum (2011), Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger (2014), and El Hadji Sy – Painting, Politics, Performance (2015). Among her latest curatorial works one can find “Portable Homelands. From Field to Factory” for “Hello World. Revising a Collection”, National Galerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2018) and in 2020, she co-directed “Home Museum” (homemuseum.net) for African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria.
She was the publisher and editor of the itinerant artists’ and writers’ organ Metronome and twice part of documenta (1997, dX and 2007, d12). She has held guest professorships at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, and at the Edinburgh College of Art. She is Global Humanities Professor in History of Art (2021-2022) at the University of Cambridge and Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, where she is currently developing the “Metabolic Museum-University”
