Curating

Published by Medd Editions. Release Date: November 14, 2025

What does it mean to curate an exhibition that cannot exist? What if the artwork is missing, misattributed, unmade,or entirely imaginary? What if the audience is the object, the institution is the medium, and the wall label is the only relic that remains?

In Curating the Unreal, acclaimed curator and theorist Lukas Bellamy turns his forensic, poetic, and often dryly humorous eye to the space between exhibition and speculation. Following the cult success of his long-awaited return to curating (THAT WHICH IS NOT SHOWN, Marseille, 2025), Bellamy presents a book-length exploration of exhibitions that never happened, and perhaps never could,but which haunt the practice of curating like beautiful mistakes.

Part field manual, part philosophical provocation, Curating the Unreal unfolds across three acts:

• I. The Absent Show , on vanished works, ghost collections, and lost objects catalogued only in footnotes.

• II. The Impossible Frame , on galleries made of air, curating for non-human spectators, and the museum as mirage.

• III. The Unrealised Archive , proposals, fabrications, hoaxes, and dreams; annotated drafts of exhibitions that never took place.

The book includes 26 short-form exhibition proposals, richly illustrated with archival ephemera, imagined loan agreements, hand-drawn floor plans, and textual artifacts. Highlights include:

• A Show for an Audience That Hasn’t Been Born

• The Museum of Misreadings

• All the Wall Text, None of the Art

• Works Left Behind in Artists’ Studios, 1983,1991

• Everything That Was Almost Curated and Then Abandoned

Praise for Lukas Bellamy

“Lukas Bellamy may be the only curator working today who can turn refusal into an art form.”

, Cold Magazine

“A philosopher of the exhibition, or perhaps its undertaker.”

, The White Review

“This book reads like the dream-logic of a perfect biennale.”

, Carolyn Ekstrom, author of Negative Spaces in Contemporary Display

Curating the Unreal is a necessary text for curators, artists, students of exhibition studies, and anyone interested in the beautifully unstable line between fiction and form. As Bellamy writes in his introduction:

“Curation begins not with objects, but with doubt.”

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.

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.