Considered as one of the more prominent curators who grew up in the German art scene, Nicolaus Schafhausen has been appointed as curator of the German Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale for the second consecutive time. After having worked and studied as an artist, he started his curatorship activity in 1990 with the founding of the Luckas &Hoffmann Gallery in Berlin. During the 90s he organised the first exhibitions of renowned artists such as Kai Althoff, Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller and Antje Majewski. Since that moment he worked for several institutions like Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Frankfurter Kunstverein and since 2006 he has been artistic and managing director of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. Toghether with Liam Gillick, the british artist chosen to represent Germany for this Biennale edition, Schafhausen points out the strong relationships between art, social matters, and architecture heritage. Considering the symbolic constitution of the pavilion, such as a product of German National Socialism, the building has not been obscured or hidden. Every room is open. In reference to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen, which has long been an important marker of applied modernism, Gillick designed a kitchen-like structure in simple pine wood that occupies the whole exhibition space. In this way, the artist has created a tension between the ideological grandeur of the site and the functional modernism brought from the many reproductions of the kitchen model. The only inhabitant is an animatronics cat that sits on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. The cat fights against the echo in the building and tells us a circular story of misrepresentation, misunderstanding and desire. The questions that arise from visiting the exhibition "How are you going to behave? A kitchen cat speaks?" reflect the strong connection between social behaviours, ideological sites and national identities. Thanks to a conversation with Nicolaus Schafhausen we could now try to give an answer. [Credits: Natasa Radovic (Installation view with cat), Steffen Jagenburg (Nicolaus Schafhausen Portrait), Courtesy Liam Gillick (Pavillon entrance)]

READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW WITH NICOLAUS SCHAFHAUSEN IN THE SECTION INTERVIEWS....