Installation view: Christian Nyampeta: Sometimes It Was Beautiful, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view April 30–June 21, 2021. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. — Installation view: *Christian Nyampeta: Sometimes It Was Beautiful*, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view April 30–June 21, 2021. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

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The following has been condensed from a longer conversation.

LINGFEI REN: How did you get your start in curation?

NAT TROTMAN: After I graduated from college, I got a job at the North Carolina Museum of Art. They had a triennial exhibition that they invited artists from all over the state to apply for and brought in a guest curator to oversee and make the selection—Elizabeth Armstrong, who was then at the Walker Art Center. I was the temporary project assistant to her on that show. I really loved it and moved to New York to go to the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. During my first year there, I saw a posting for a job at the Guggenheim and applied and got hired to work on the Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle exhibition in 2001. That was my first time [working in curation]. At that point, actually, I was a research assistant. And then over the years I worked freelance for a little while for the museum and then was a curatorial assistant starting in 2003. And I have slowly worked my way up through the various levels of the curatorial department over the ensuing 20 years.

Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, on view March 26 – September 6, 2010; Tacita Dean Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage's composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New Y… — *Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance*, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, on view March 26 – September 6, 2010; Tacita Dean Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage's composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films), 2008 Six 16mm color film installation, with sound, 4 min., 33 sec., on continuous loop. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2021.

LINGFEI: So, being a Curator of Performance and Media, did you choose that area of specialization?

NAT: My current position, Curator of Performance and Media, is a very unique one because there has never been a curator for Performance and Media at the Guggenheim before this. Unlike MoMA, say, we don’t have departments within the curatorial department—we’re a smaller organization, and so curators have specialties but they don't really have teams assigned to each specialty. Everyone works on lots of different kinds of projects and the way that the specialties emerge is out of the personal interests and expertise of each curator when they come to the point of being promoted or hired as a full curator at the museum. Some of the curators have regional specialties, some have historic specialties, some have medium-based specialties. It's not like I have jurisdiction over every performance or video piece that happens at the museum. The title that I have came out of a moment five or six years ago when I was promoted to a full curator, as well as being responsive to my own interests. It was also part of a broader acknowledgment by the Guggenheim that performance and media are vital elements of the contemporary art world and deserve focused attention within the museum.

LINGFEI: Also, because photography, video, and performance are interdisciplinary, in many cases, those mediums work together.

NAT: Exactly. There's a lot of fluidity between those mediums—especially those mediums. At another museum, I might have taken the title “Curator of Time-Based Media,” for instance, and that would maybe encompass photography a little bit more. But because we had a photography curator, it felt important to distinguish from that.

Catherine Opie: American Photographer; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, on view September 26, 2008 – January 7, 2009. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2021. — *Catherine Opie: American Photographer*; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, on view September 26, 2008 – January 7, 2009. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2021.

Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Nursing, 2004 © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. — Catherine Opie, *Self-Portrait/Nursing*, 2004 © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

LINGFEI: You also work in acquisitions for the museum’s collection. Do you use the same strategies or work in different ways?

NAT: We use very similar strategies in thinking about how we're building out the collection and how we're building out the exhibition and performance program, and often go to the same artists. There are far fewer opportunities in the exhibition realm than there are in the collection realm, so we're able to engage the work of a much broader group of artists through collecting practices and support artists through collecting their work. Basically, every curator is involved in acquisitions to some extent, so that's not unique to me at all. But I do focus on photography and video, and occasionally performance.

LINGFEI: When you curate an exhibition, what is your mindset and your process of curation? Do you start with one work and expand from there or do you start with an idea of what you want the show to be?

NAT: There really is no one way that an exhibition project comes into being. In the case of a monographic show, for instance, a show of one artist’s work would come about through looking at that artist’s work and building a relationship with them over a long period of time. It would be the artist who would really be leading that presentation. When you're talking about a group show, I guess I would divide it up into collection-based exhibitions versus loan exhibitions. In the case of a loan exhibition, it might start from one or two works that I would be particularly interested in doing, or one or two groups of movements or historical moments. It's really going to be more about deep research into the subject area, whether it's a historical moment. medium or more subjective association of works.

Clockwise, from top left: Lucy Raven, Subterrestrial Cinema, 2017–18; © Lucy Raven; photo: courtesy the artist. Christian Nyampeta, Sometimes It Was Beautiful, 2018; © Christian Nyampeta; photo: courtesy the artist. Ragnar Kjartansson, Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy, 2018; © Ragnar Kjartansson; photo: Ragnar Kjartansson; courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavík. Wu Tsang, Anthem (working title), 2021; © Wu Tsang; rendering by Lucie Rebeyrol.

LINGFEI: How about the show Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda?

NAT: Re/Projections is a very unique case, again, of a show that is really not even a show. Re/Projections is really a series of projects that we've grouped together under one title, but each of the four parts is conceived independently and has its own identity and its own curator. We were confronted with a really unique opportunity when, because of the pandemic, two traveling shows that were to be hosted in the rotunda had to be postponed or canceled considering they couldn’t travel. We had an empty rotunda and uncertainty about when the museum could reopen and how many people could enter the space at any given time, as well as the real limitations on finances. I should say—exhibitions on the scale of the rotunda in the Guggenheim take, at a minimum, two years to plan, usually four or five years, so we have a limitation on budget but also a real limitation on time. We decided that it would be really interesting to open the space of the rotunda to a younger group of artists, or artists who are not household names, to come up with a strategy whereby we offered the space to one artist at a time to take over the entire rotunda. That was a way of privileging multiple voices and taking advantage of a complicated situation and enabling artists to use the space in a creative but nimble way. Through that process we decided as a group to focus on video and performance because it has a unique way of being able to hold a large amount of space with fairly structurally simple aesthetic gestures. The basic idea, that you see now on view in Christian Nyampeta's exhibition of having a big screen hanging in the center of the rotunda that can have his film projected onto it, that audience members can watch from all different places throughout the ramps of the museum, remaining socially distanced but having a collective experience of a single artwork from multiple points of view—here was an opportunity to use the center orientation of the museum in a more creative way and to give that opportunity to artists who haven't had that opportunity before.

LINGFEI: I got a chance to see both sessions of In-Between Days. They were really fantastic. I'm wondering, what was the decision-making process like to choose those videos and films?

NAT: The first project within Re/Projections was, as you said, In-Between Days, which featured ten films in two parts of five each. The point of that was to highlight works in the collection that we had never shown before, and also to expand the collection. One was the work by Shezad Dawood, which was on loan from our colleagues at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which had also never been shown here before. And then there were two works by Sky Hopinka and Steffani Jameson that are actually being acquired through the show. Showing it in In-Between Days was a way to argue for expanding the Guggenheim's collection in light of our DEAI initiative and other initiatives to change the museum's collection and its identity. It was a way of showing what we have been, what we are and what we want to be as we move forward. The selection process for the films was a mixture of the mood that they evoked and how the films, even though they were made prior to the pandemic, seemed to draw on emotional and social states, broadly, that people are thinking about now. I tried to pick films that felt very current, but also all films that were 16:9 aspect ratio and were of a quality, a definition, that would look good on such a big screen. There were a number of works from the ‘90s that I would have loved to have shown, but they were made in standard-definition video. It would not have been doing those videos any favors to show them on a projection screen that was thirty-six feet across.

Jesper Just, Some Draughty Window, 2007. Digital color video, transferred from 16 mm film, with sound, 9 min. 37 sec., edition 4/7. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Heather and Tony Podesta Collection 2010.2. © Jesper Just. — Jesper Just, *Some Draughty Window*, 2007. Digital color video, transferred from 16 mm film, with sound, 9 min. 37 sec., edition 4/7. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Heather and Tony Podesta Collection 2010.2. © Jesper Just.

LINGFEI: One of the pieces that had the greatest impact on me was Jesper Just’s Some Draughty Window. The gender of the figure in the video is changing, also the age.

NT: That was a really interesting piece to include because it was the oldest video in the whole project—both the oldest made and the earliest acquired. It was made in 2007 and we acquired it in 2010. It was one I really wanted to include, both because of the fluidity of identity that it presented, but also, on a very basic level, it explores weightlessness and the idea of a hanging screen in the middle of the Guggenheim and the figure floating through steps. It felt like a very poetic way to address the architecture—it's literally about floating and breathing, having that moment of calm and meditation in the middle of a number of videos that were much more emotionally overwrought. I really thought of that as being a counterpoint to the video that came right after it in that program which was Liz Magic Laser and Simone Leigh’s video Breakdown, featuring Alicia Hall Moran, which also featured a single figure in a stationary space. It's a very extroverted piece, very forward, very loud and bold and then Jesper’s is more internally oriented, but they both feature figures in isolation which a number of the works in the series did. Just the idea of a single figure or maybe two figures coming into conflict with each other, I thought was evocative of our current reality.

Liz Magic Laser and Simone Leigh in collaboration with Alicia Hall Moran, Breakdown, 2011. Color video, with sound, 9 min. 44 sec., edition 2/3. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Council 2017.78. © Liz Magic Laser and Simone Leigh. — Liz Magic Laser and Simone Leigh in collaboration with Alicia Hall Moran, *Breakdown*, 2011. Color video, with sound, 9 min. 44 sec., edition 2/3. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Council 2017.78. © Liz Magic Laser and Simone Leigh.

LINGFEI: In-Between Days was organized by you, and what about the other three projects in Re/Projections?

NAT: I organized In-Between Days, but Christian Nyampeta's installation, which is on view now, was organized by my colleague Xiaoyu Weng. The last project in the series, which is by Wu Tsang, is organized by my colleague X Zhu-Nowell, then I am organizing the middle one, which is a four-day performance by Ragnar Kjartansson. In Christian’s piece, up through June 21, there's red light all in the rotunda, with murals on the wall, an installation in the high gallery and a radio play on the top ramp, with special furniture and the screen hanging in the center. It's a more complex installation than In-Between Days, which was very minimal and very short—intentionally just a transitional point from Countryside, the last exhibition we had, into Christian’s. I think of In-Between Days as being a prelude to the solo projects that followed. Wu Tsang’s piece will involve a massic fabric sculpture, a different kind of projection and a sound installation that will fill up the entire rotunda. Then Ragnar’s piece will be a very intense bright light for a four-day period entitled Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy. It’ll involve about twenty female singer-guitarists spread all through the museum playing songs for eight hours a day. Visitors will move through the sonic space through a durational performance.

LINGFEI: What will be the plan after Re/Projections?

NAT: We also have Off the Record [on now], we have Deana Lawson’s show, we have a show called A Year With Children that’s related to our 50th anniversary of the Learning Through Art program that our education department runs. We have an amazing collection show called Knotted, Torn, Scattered, and a Pollock show—so there are many different things happening at the museum at any given moment. In the rotunda, following Re/Projections, we’ll have another multi-part project-based hybrid exhibition coming up, which will be a multi-ramp presentation of collection works by Vasily Kandinsky. Then a series of artists’ solo exhibitions by more contemporary artists who are also working in the realm of abstraction. That’ll be a project by Etel Adnan, one by Jennie C. Jones and one by Cecilia Vicuña. Then, at the same time as those projects, all four of the tower galleries will be taken over by the Gillian Wearing exhibition that I’m doing with Jennifer Blessing. I see the Re/Projections and the Kandisnky-Adnan-Jones-Vicuña show as being two halves of the museum’s identity. Re/Projections is very much about representation, identity and about conceptual frameworks through time-based media. The later projects are about abstraction, largely through painting but also through sculpture.

This interview is in conjunction with the current Issue No.25 Curation.

As the second part of Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda, Christian Nyampeta: Sometimes It Was Beautiful is on view through June 21, 2021, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.