by Margerie Hinche
When I first wrote about Lukas Bellamy a few months ago, he was a curator in the wilderness, searching for a subject—he had not mounted an exhibition in nearly two years. He was reading municipal zoning laws for inspiration, visiting sheep farms, theorising about storage depots, and politely declining to curate anything that could be described as “digestible.” At the time, I wrote that his curatorial practice resembled a lighthouse with no ships.
Now the ships have come.
Following that article’s publication, Bellamy received no fewer than seven invitations to curate exhibitions across Europe. Some were cautious, others ambitious. A few were plainly absurd. He turned down most, including three that merit some telling, if only to illuminate the strange, flickering standard by which he judges artistic meaning.
The Three Exhibitions He Declined
1. “Neo-Pastoral: Art and the Climate Imagination”
Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva
A group show probing ecological futures through installations of moss, fog, and recycled media. Bellamy was intrigued—“There was at least a spine”—but ultimately declined, citing a “thematic overabundance” and a curatorial brief that used the phrase eco-sublime four times. “I don’t think an exhibition should comfort us for losing the world,” he told me.
2. “Infinite Scroll: The Art of the Algorithmic Present”
Kunsthalle Munich
This proposal—populated by generative video art, neural nets, and wall text composed by AI—struck him as “well-intentioned but thoroughly dead.” He admired the intention but was allergic to the packaging. “We know what art and technology looks like. It needs no further confirmation.”
3. “Objects of a Former Europe”
A major institution in London he asked me not to name
A sprawling survey of minor artefacts and forgotten design, loosely grouped around post-war nostalgia. Bellamy praised its ambition but found its logic “too museum-adjacent.” “I’m not an archivist,” he said. “I’m looking for exhibitions that leak—where the logic doesn’t hold.”
What He’s Curating Instead
In October, Bellamy will open his first show in nearly four years:
“THAT WHICH IS NOT SHOWN”
at the non-profit space Velatura, in Marseille.
It’s a deliberately anti-spectacular show, consisting of:
• Artworks that are absent but described.
• Shipping crates, unopened, displayed as-is, accompanied by imagined labels.
• Wall texts for things not on view, sourced from other exhibitions across time.
• Audio guides that speak of spaces the visitor cannot access.
There will be a sculpture that has been loaned but never arrived.
There will be a borrowed piece covered entirely in protective cloth, “for conservation reasons.”
There will be a room with nothing but the smell of lacquer and warm dust.
Bellamy describes the show as “a quiet meditation on the conditions of exhibition—the ghost of curation rather than its performance.” It draws on the writings of Georges Perec, Maria Eichhorn, and the indexical practices of 1960s conceptualism, but also on storage slips, failed loans, and institutional absences. In short, it is a show about what shows cannot show.
When I asked him if this risks becoming merely a void—another conceptual anti-show—he smiled.
“I don’t mind if no one comes. Or if they come and leave uncertain. What matters is that the space resists clarity. We’ve had too much clarity lately, too much legibility. I want people to doubt the frame itself.”
On Curating Now
Bellamy is wary of curatorial celebrity. He has no studio assistants, no press team, no merch. He still wears charcoal linen. He has started writing again, and rumour has it he is working on a book of “impossible exhibitions”—a catalogue of shows that could never happen but must be imagined. Tentative title: Curating the Unreal.
Asked what he hopes audiences will take from THAT WHICH IS NOT SHOWN, Bellamy simply said:
“Maybe just that not all art has to appear.”
Then he returned to his notes.
