Hans-Ulrich Obrist - The Interview Project

The Interview Project

Obrist's interest in interviews was first triggered by two very long conversations that he read when he was a student. One was between Pierre Cabanne and Marcel Duchamp, and the other between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon. "These books somehow brought me to art," he has said. "They were like oxygen, and were the first time that the idea of an interview with an artist as a medium became of interest to me. They also sparked my interest in the idea of sustained conversations—of interviews recorded over a period of time, perhaps over the course of many years; the Bacon/Sylvester interviews took place over three long sessions, for example."

So far, nearly 2000 hours of interviews have been recorded. This fascinating archive is referred to by Obrist as “an endless conversation”. He began publishing these interviews in Artforum in 1996 and in 2003 eleven of these interviews were released as Interviews Volume 1. Volume 2 was published in Summer 2010. With the release, a total of 69 artists, architects, writers, film-makers, scientists, philosophers, musicians and performers share their unique experiences and frank insights.

The longer interviews in Obrist's archive are being published singly in ongoing series of books entitled "The Conversation Series". Thus far, 26 books have been published, each containing a lengthy interview with cultural figures including John Baldessari, Zaha Hadid, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Yoko Ono, Robert Crumb and Rem Koolhaas. A number of Obrist's interviews have also appeared in the Berlin culture magazine 032c, including those with artists Elaine Sturtevant and Richard Hamilton, historian Eric Hobsbawm, and structural engineer Cecil Balmond of Arup.