Pieter Boons

Since 2008 Pieter Boons (°1980, Belgium) has been affiliated with the Middelheim Museum and in2017 he was appointed curator.

The Middelheim Museum was founded in 1950 as an open air museum for contemporary sculpture in a protected landscape. It’s a free and open air museum where a permanent display of some 300 artworks are being altered with temporary exhibitions. TheMiddelheim likes to experiment in close collaborations with contemporary artists often resulting in making new commissions, tailor-made for the museum collection or the exhibitions. Therefore Pieter Boons ‘ curatorial practice needs to be hands-on and so it often starts pragmatically from the making itself of artworks or exhibitions. He has worked very closely with artists such as Roman Signer, ErwinWurm, Kader Attia, Monster Chetwynd, William Forsythe and Andrea Zittel amongst others.
Although most projects test the resilience of sculpture in the most broad sense, the projects relate themselves to an (inter)national zeitgeist where issues such as gender, power structures, the politics of identity and the history of imperialism are never far away.

In 2019 the museum had a big focus on performance art, programming national and international pioneering artists in an extensive performance program and in 2 solo shows: Ria Pacquée and Ana Mendieta. In 2021, the Middelheim Museum unfolded its own untold colonial history in a major group show Congoville, curated and conceived in collaboration with Sandrine Colard. For 2022 Boons is working on Camille Henrot’s first solo-exhibition in Belgium focussing on sculpture in the practice of this omnivorous artist. In 2023 the Middelheim will rethink her collection presentation and will collide its exhibitions and collection presentations into a new program of long and mid-term projects. 

Before his assignment as a curator, Pieter Boons was working under the name HEIMAT as an independent architect, scenographer and cultural producer for Designvlaanderen, Flanders Fashion Institute, SMAK, BOZAR & M Leuven amongst others. In Borgerhout, suburbian Antwerp, he co-initiated and artist run space Conflictroom (2010) and ran his own HEIMAT projectspace (2012-2017), both independent alternative art platforms. He worked with Arthur Zmjevski, Wendy Morris, Sarah Vanagt, Rinus van de Velde, Luc Deleu, Bernhard Willhelm, Manor Grunewald and many others in often short, intensely diverse and precarious projects ranging from lectures, screenings, exhibitions and editions as conversations on bridging disciplines and opinions.