Behind the Scenes with Joël Riff: Fondation Hermès and the Conditions of Encounter
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- 7 min read
Yuval Aluf
Coffee machines hiss; cutlery strikes porcelain; chairs drag lightly across the floor. Joël Riff and I meet in a busy café in Highbury & Islington, the room layered with overlapping conversations. He gestures toward the noise rather than away from it. For him, the setting is not a distraction, but a part of the experience. “Anything that is part of the experience is worth considering,” he tells me. “Noise, shadows, corners, furniture; nothing is outside the frame.”
For Riff, context is never neutral. An exhibition does not begin at the threshold. It begins in the walk toward the space, in the light of the street, in the architecture you cross before you enter. The world is not separate from art; it is its condition. As curator of La Verrière, the Brussels exhibition space of Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, he has built a programme that quietly unsettles prior institutional ideas of exhibiting. His work moves between display, publishing, research, and public programming, yet he resists treating them as a single output. They are distinct experiences with distinct responsibilities.
“To read an exhibition book is not the same as to experience the display with your body,” he says. The difference is not technical; it is ethical. He is openly critical of the traditional exhibition catalogue. “I don’t want to show you what you missed,” he says, almost impatiently. The book, for him, cannot function as documentation or consolation. When La Verrière publishes an exhibition catalogue, it is conceived as an autonomous form - not as an archive of the exhibition, but as another site of encounter. The works that appear in the exhibition catalogues don’t necessarily appear in the exhibition, and vice versa. They open with a commissioned guest author rather than his own voice. The text does not explain the exhibition; it expands it.
What emerges is not a multiplication of formats for productivity’s sake, but a refusal of hierarchy. Writing is not subordinate to display, nor is display automatically privileged because it is physical. Each medium must justify its existence. For Riff, the decision to stage an exhibition carries a particular responsibility. “If a project could exist as a book,” he tells me, “then make a book.” Exhibitions, in his view, should exist only when the experience they offer cannot be translated elsewhere. This logic reaches its clearest articulation in what Riff calls the “extended solo.” Neither a traditional solo exhibition nor a group show, the format places one artist at the centre while acknowledging the network that surrounds them: writers, peers, influences, and affinities. The artist is not presented as a sealed, monumental figure, but as part of a living constellation. “Artists are not alone,” he says. “They are part of a community.”
This structure becomes tangible in Sourdre (2025), Claudine Monchaussé’s exhibition at La Verrière. Bringing together around forty ceramic sculptures alongside works by both historical and contemporary artists, the exhibition unfolded through a carefully staged spatial arrangement rather than a singular, unified display. Installed through different heights and positions beneath the skylight, the works required a physical navigation of the space, where meaning emerged through proximity, movement, and the viewer’s shifting relation to each object. Rather than relying on explanatory mediation, the exhibition emphasised the presence of the works themselves, what Riff describes as a “charge that emanates”, reinforcing his insistence on encounter as the primary condition through which the exhibition operates.
When Fondation Hermès approached him in 2022 to reimagine the programme at La Verrière, he recognised the opportunity immediately. The space offered something rare: freedom from institutional categories. Solo or group? Contemporary or historic? National or international? “We are free,” he recalls thinking. “So let’s use that.” Within the wider structure of Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, this freedom is partly structural. La Verrière is one of several exhibition platforms the foundation operates internationally, alongside programmes in Seoul, Tokyo, and Singapore. Each responds to its local artistic environment while remaining connected through shared commissions and exchanges. Rather than exporting a single institutional model, the foundation allows each space to evolve within its context, creating dialogue between scenes that could otherwise remain distant.
Within Fondation Hermès, this flexibility is also tied to a particular understanding of making. Riff often describes curating itself as a form of craftsmanship. Like the artisans whose practices the foundation has long supported, the curator shapes experiences through careful adjustments: scale, rhythm, proximity, and light. The exhibition becomes something crafted rather than declared. Curating, in this sense, moves away from managerial coordination and closer to an applied practice where form emerges through attention to materials and encounters.
The extended solo acknowledges that artists still need institutional recognition and that a solo exhibition still matters. But it resists the mythology of the solitary genius. Practice, in Riff’s framework, is relational. Context is constitutive. The word he returns to is foyer. In French, it means both hearth and focal point, warmth, and lens. A place of gathering, and a point from which vision extends. This dualism structures his exhibitions: centred yet expansive, intimate yet outward-looking.
Crucially, the process does not begin with PDFs, portfolios, or digital previews. It begins in the studio. Riff describes the studio as his primary research site. “My way is an analogue experience,” he says. “What I know, I have experienced.” He recounts visiting a studio in Shigaraki, Japan, where he and the artist shared no spoken language. The artist apologised. Riff reassured him: “The studio is talking to me. We don’t need another language.” This insistence on encounter shapes his curatorial position more broadly. He is wary of the growing tendency to over-frame exhibitions through explanatory texts and curatorial statements. “When you have a text, it’s a border,” he says.
Too much framing risks implying that the exhibition is a sealed intellectual territory, pre-digested for consumption. Riff’s approach moves deliberately in the opposite direction. By reducing explanatory mediation, he seeks to restore a slower, more direct relationship between the viewer and the work. For him, this restraint is not anti-intellectualism. It is a responsibility. He prefers the French word commissaire, historically associated with authority. Authority, in his view, is not domination but accountability. If a curator shapes the conditions of perception, they must assume responsibility for the form that mediation takes.
In Brussels, a similar logic operates at the urban scale. Long described as an alternative to larger art capitals such as Paris or Berlin, the city has built its reputation through consistency rather than spectacle. Over the past two decades, a dense ecosystem of galleries, collectors, and institutions has emerged, anchored by spaces such as WIELS and the developing KANAL-Centre Pompidou. Even as market pressures intensify across Europe, with recent 2025 reports pointing to increased selectivity among collectors, Brussels continues to sustain a stable ecosystem, underpinned by a strong domestic collector base and consistent activity across mid-sized galleries. At Art Brussels, for example, galleries reported that around 40% of sales were made to Belgian collectors, a substantial proportion that points to a strong and active domestic base. This local engagement continues to sustain the city’s ecosystem, even as international buyers reinforce Brussels’ role as a site of exchange, balancing continuity with circulation.
“It’s a city where conversations happen easily,” Riff notes. “You move from one place to another, and the network reveals itself.” La Verrière does not sit above that ecosystem. It participates within it. Riff’s practice also exhibits a broader shift within contemporary curating. Since the early 2000s, exhibitions have increasingly expanded beyond display to include publishing projects, research platforms, talks, and public programming. Riff participates in this expanded field, yet his emphasis remains distinct. Where many curatorial models foreground interpretation and discourse, he returns insistently to the specificity of encounter, emphasising the differences in how it unfolds across media rather than collapsing them into a single discursive form.
In recent years, a number of institutions and curators have begun to reconsider the balance between exhibition, discourse, and encounter. Programmes at the Serpentine Galleries in London and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, alongside curatorial models developed by figures such as Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adam Szymczyk, have expanded the exhibition into a broader discursive field of talks, publishing, and research. At the same time, this expansion has sharpened attention to the conditions of viewing itself, and to the specific experience produced by encountering work in space. Riff’s practice can be situated within this shift, not as a rejection of curatorial expansion, but as a recalibration of it - one that insists on the distinct role of the exhibition within an increasingly mediated cultural landscape.
For decades, art-historical and curatorial writing has emphasised how objects transform the spaces that contain them. The exhibition is no longer understood as a neutral container but as a spatial and interpretative structure. Riff accepts this premise, yet his emphasis shifts the discussion elsewhere. Rather than multiplying interpretative frameworks around the work, his exhibitions attempt to recalibrate the conditions of encounter by limiting explanatory mediation and shifting emphasis toward the viewer’s direct, spatial and temporal engagement with the work. This position appears particularly relevant at a moment when the exhibition is increasingly treated as part of a broader discursive field. While many curatorial models expand the exhibition outward into a larger field of interpretation, Riff’s projects insist on the specificity of the exhibition as a physical situation, not as a privileged form, but as one distinct mode of encounter among others, in which objects, viewers, and space operate together rather than through layers of explanation.
Seen in this light, his practice does not reject the expanded field of curating, but it subtly reorganises it. Publishing, conversation, and research remain integral parts of the project, yet they do not replace the exhibition’s central condition: the possibility of encountering work directly, within a shared space and moment. In an art world increasingly structured by circulation and mediation, the need for physical encounter may be an exhibition's most enduring and prominent quality.
