Collector Profile: Francesca
Thyssen-Bornemisza
One of the world’s most important art collecting dynasties has a clear forward focus on the environment, specifically our oceans. VAULT spoke to the woman at the helm, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Image credit: Dale Harding, Extractive painting 2, 2021, Dale Harding: Through a lens of visitation at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne. Photo: Andrew Curtis. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, activist, philanthropist and patron of the arts, is the fourth generation of the Thyssen family committed to the arts. Her father, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, was the founder of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, where Francesca continues to serve on the Board.
In 2002, Thyssen-Bornemisza founded (and continues to Chair), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) in Vienna. In 2019, TBA21 established a new office in Madrid, with a contract with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza to organise two exhibitions a year from the TBA21 collection. Alongside this, TBA21 partners with institutions internationally to lend works and mount cultural programs of ambitious scale and scope. In 2011, Thyssen-Bornemisza co-founded TBA21–Academy, which convenes artists, scientists, policymakers and local leadership in sustained cross-disciplinary explorations to catalyse oceanic research and advocacy. In 2019, TBA21-Academy inaugurated a new art space in Venice called Ocean Space.
Thyssen-Bornemisza works with contemporary artists through a program of commissions – her preferred method of adding works to the collection. She is committed to supporting artists in the production and creation of new works that fuel engagement with the most pressing issues of the Anthropocene. Since 2002, TBA21 has built an unparalleled collection of contemporary art under Thyssen-Bornemisza’s leadership, including more than 300 commissions by artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Monica Bonvicini, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Cerith Wyn Evans, Amar Kanwar, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ernesto Neto, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Ai Weiwei.
Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza is the recipient of numerous honours, including the Simmons Award for Philanthropic Excellence in 2015, the Merit Award in Gold from the province of Vienna in 2009 for her cultural engagement with the city, the Icelandic Order of the Falcon in 2007 and the Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award in 1996.
Francesca, thank you sincerely for your time. I am profoundly aware of your family’s extraordinary legacy of collecting! Indeed, I have visited the museums in Madrid many times – as an art history student, thank you for your family’s connoisseurship and generosity. This is a great honour. What was the catalyst that started the direction for your collecting?
I founded TBA21 in 2002, nearly 20 years ago. We actually embarked on our first commission with Kutluğ Ataman in 2004 for a project called Küba, which portraits the cultural identity of the inhabitants of an area in southern Istanbul known by this name that emerged towards the end of the 1960s and became a haven for Kurdish people. At the time, Istanbul had expanded from seven to fourteen million citizens, and the government had been exerting control over communities of different minority groups that wouldn’t adapt to their political path. It was a very strong social and political statement that the artist was making, and in turn that began to drive us, TBA21, much further over the coming years as we commissioned close to 300 works for the collection. All those commissions carried a very strong either social, political or environmental message, dealing with the most important urgencies of our time. It made all the difference to have a unique selection of projects and politically charged artists whose creative instincts lay in artistic research and storytelling.
I remember feeling very influenced by the memory of my father who, back in the ’80s, engaged in a cultural exchange with the Soviet Union by lending his private collection of art to exhibitions at the Pushkin, the Hermitage and also to Novosibirsk – the capital of Siberia – where he wanted to establish, or at least contribute to, world peace by breaking down the prejudices, barriers and fears at the height of the Cold War. He believed in cultural diplomacy, and I went on many of these trips with him. It was something quite extraordinary that I took with me as I moved forward in my commitment to create a unique collection rooted in the practice of commissioning artworks.
Can you explain the purpose of the Academy?
Ten years ago, I co-founded TBA21–Academy together with Markus Reymann. With this, the work of the foundation took on a different tone. The Academy became the exploratory soul of TBA21. It developed its own methodologies and programs, which were very independent and focused entirely on the oceans. The program looks at the oceans through collaborative research led by artists, bringing in Indigenous voices, policy makers and scientists to translate, articulate and help foster a better understanding of the ocean. We hope to move people to embrace and value the oceans, because art really helps us develop empathy and establish a relationship with an entity that may otherwise be too foreign for us.
The artists we work with have always been the antennas of our time, and they are able to bring forward and work with important issues that are complex and can seem either too big or too explosive for us to tackle. At the beginning, we were often asked: Why just the oceans? Why are you focusing on just one thing? But that just showed how little the complexity of the oceans is understood. When it comes to climate change, the oceans are our biggest ally. The Academy has developed an incredible program of exhibitions and educational work over the last 10 years – and with the establishment of Ocean Space in Venice, it is now hosted in one of the European epicentres of rising sea levels, with the Venetian salt marshes and the lagoon as well as all the infringements from huge cruise liners and mass tourism. Ocean Space recently received the best ratings in visitor experience for cultural spaces in Venice, which recognised the importance it gives to the Venetian public and community, while at the same time embracing international visitors.
Could you share with VAULT the direction or focus of your collection? I know you are interested in the collision of art and science – tell me about your interest in climate initiatives.
I can maybe answer this question by referring to a work by Territorial Agency called Oceans in Transformation, which is presently on view at Ocean Space. The exhibition synthesises three years of research to unfold one of the most extensive readings of the Anthropocene Ocean to date, exploring new ways of connecting research groups that address the oceans at a time of rapid change. Linking science, arts and politics by way of shared images, datasets and narratives that have unfolded over several years through interactions with hundreds of scientists, research institutions, intergovernmental organisations, scholars, activists, policy makers and artists. It is a digital project that correlates literally thousands of different data sets which are collected online in open sources, from NASA to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). To visualise the impact that we are all actually having on the ocean, the exhibition presents the datasets of illegal fishing fleets, big container ship traffic, and oil and gas exploration using incredibly loud seismic guns to find new deposits hidden deeper and deeper under the sea floor. It clearly displays the impact of rising sea levels, and how this will impact hundreds of millions of people in less than a century. You see the routes that are used by the shipping industry to move goods from one place to the rest of the world, which we control with the tap of our thumbs when we press ‘buy’ on any one of these online shopping pages. It is a calling to our consciousness, to understand where we stand, what we’re doing, what our responsibilities are and how all of us are implicated in climate change.
Your collection has a clear social agenda. How important is it to grow the collection into the future, and to that end, do you want the collection to reflect the times? Can you share your vision with us?
We embark on long term artistic research projects that stretch over years, sometimes. Our Joan Jonas commission lasted four years, Territorial Agency took three, Armin Linke’s project continues even after its exhibition in Venice three years ago, Walid Raad’s exhibition is just about to open in fall 2021 and has entailed four years of research into the legacy of the Thyssen-Bornemisza family’s commitment to the arts over four generations. Of course, not every work takes years to produce. To the contrary, we have recently embarked on a series of commissions for st_age, our new online platform. It presents projects produced in collaboration with partners from around the world, tackling the urgencies of today through the lens of art. Each work is further contextualised by a podcast series, artist conversations, backstage voices, research clusters and calls to action, all intended to strengthen the work’s understanding and impact.
It is the things we do that make an impact on the world that we live in. Every single one of us carries that responsibility and I think the faster we can understand that, the better we will be able to adapt to a new world as we emerge from the Covid-19 crisis. In the beginning, we created an emergency fund to help artists maintain their creative practices during the first wave of the pandemic, in order to mitigate the loss that would inevitably result from much of the world’s cultural programming being cancelled or indefinitely postponed.
Looking forward, we are focusing on our move to Madrid, with an ongoing exhibition program at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. At the same time, we continue to collaborate with numerous biennials and independent art initiatives all around the world (for instance, the Biennale of Sydney), with whom we share a common practice based on care and generosity, to assist in the realisation of new productions, supporting them in the process. As we approach our 20th anniversary next year, we are looking very much at the process of healing. How can we make peace with ourselves, peace with each other and peace with nature? This will become our focus over the next 20 years, taking on the challenge and collective responsibility of working to mitigate and heal the catastrophic effects of climate change ourselves, focusing on how we as an organisation can become more honest about the social and environmental changes that we are advocating.
Territorial Agency: Oceans in Transformation continues at Ocean Space, Venice until August 29, 2021. The Soul Expanding Ocean #1
Taloi Havini is on show at Ocean Space, Venice until October 17, 2021.
tba21.org
tba21.org/#item--academy—1819
ocean-space.org
ocean-archive.org
stage.tba21.org
Image credit: Installation view Territorial Agency: Oceans in Transformation, 2020, Ocean Space, Venice. Photo: Enrico Fiorese © Enrico Fioresed
Image credit: Installation view, KUTLUG ATAMAN, Küba Talking heads, The Sorting Office, 2005, Artangel, London. Photo: Artangel, London © gerdastudio
Image credit: HIMALI SINGH SOIN, Subcontinentment, 2020, (soundpiece). Courtesy the artist
This article was originally published in VAULT Magazine Issue 35 (August – October 2021). Click here to Subscribe
