by Margerie Hinche
There is something faintly paradoxical—almost tragicomic—about a curator without a subject. A painter can paint. A sculptor can carve. A composer can hum tunelessly until inspiration arrives. But a curator, that most elusive of creative professionals, needs something to curate. Without objects, ideas, or at the very least a thematic scaffold, they are like a lighthouse with no ships, blinking nobly into the fog.
I recently spent a long afternoon with Lukas Bellamy, one of the more interesting curators to emerge from London’s fiercely theoretical art scene of the early 2010s. Bellamy, now in his late 30s and dressed like an archivist disguised as an 18th century locomotive driver (charcoal linen, many pockets), has been without a formal exhibition project for nearly two years. His last show, After the Afterimage—a kind of speculative archaeology of failed technologies and almost-inventions—garnered real attention. Then came the silence.
“The art world,” he told me over nettle tea in a gallery café that neither of us were affiliated with, “is full of content. Too much, really. But so little of it is curatable.”
What he meant, is that the presence of things is not enough. The role of the curator, in his view, is to make meaning, not merely to arrange. Bellamy is allergic to exhibitions that read like Pinterest boards: “Show me a show called Soft Ruptures and I guarantee it’s just ceramics and wall text.” He wants stakes. Friction. Contexts colliding like tectonic plates. “Curation should be an argument, not a mood.”
The Search
Since 2023, Bellamy has been wandering—intellectually and literally. He’s visited artists in Eindhoven and sheep farmers in Northumberland. He spent three months in Athens trying to reconstruct the exhibition habits of minor Byzantine saints. He attended a blockchain art fair in Lisbon and left halfway through a panel titled Decentralising Curation: Towards an AI-Praxis.
Mostly, he’s been walking. Thinking. Reading shipping manifests, recipes, city zoning records. His notebooks are full of abortive ideas:
• “The Aesthetics of Partial Completion”
• “Everything That Is Mislabelled in the British Museum”
• “Forms of Waiting in Rural Infrastructure”
• “Exhibition of Only the Backs of Paintings”
• “Artworks Touched by David Hockney”
Some are whimsical. Others quietly brilliant. But none, he says, has yet formed “the spine of a show.” It is not that there is no art. It is that there is no frame through which the art becomes meaningfully public.
The Curatorial Condition
Bellamy’s situation is more common than many realise. We are used to seeing curators as cultural engineers—decisive, thematic, multilingual. But behind the scenes, many of them are—if not lost—then certainly unmoored. As art has become more global, more digital, and more continuous (there is no longer an “off-season”), the curator’s role has become at once more essential and more obscure.
They are no longer just “choosers of objects.” They are mediators, theorists, bureaucrats, diplomats, narrators, and in some cases—tragically—event planners. The more exhibitions proliferate, the more pressure there is to say something new, even as that something must also be fundable, installable, reviewable, and shareable on Instagram.
“The great challenge,” Bellamy told me, “is finding a form of curation that doesn’t merely illustrate a concept, but produces it.”
What Next?
For now, Bellamy continues to look. He’s intrigued by neglected art storage facilities—“the climate-controlled unconscious of the art world”—and recently visited one in Poland where a crate marked simply “CHESS, CONCRETE” caught his attention. He has written to the institution to inquire.
When I asked what success would look like, he paused.
“I want to curate an exhibition that answers a question nobody asked,” he said, “but that, once asked, they cannot stop thinking about.”
Until then, the curator remains in search of a subject. And perhaps that, too, is a kind of exhibition—one not yet built, but already quietly unfolding.
If you are interested in Bellamy curating a show at your museum or gallery please get in touch.
