REAL ESTATE
NINA BEIER
UNTIL JANUARY 4, 2026
BOZAR
Nederlandse versie
Smarter than the Curator
At the exit of the Baldessari show in Bozar, you have to weave your way through a crowd of Goya-lickers to reach the entrance of Nina Beier’s solo exhibition. After Baldessari’s brilliant shouting—tickling aesthetic and institutional rules in a refreshingly schoolish way (his works are almost diagrams)—your eyes need a moment to adjust to the more subdued palette of Beier’s assemblages. This show opened in October 2025 at Bozar, half a year after her solo New Works at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Since De Ateliers is a space geared toward emerging artists, the exhibition inevitably raises the question of where Beier currently stands in her career. After retrospective exhibitions last year in Finland, Mexico, and France, the question now seems rather whether Beier, as a mid-career artist, still has room for what one might call a beginner’s freshness: searching, unpreparedness, openness, and spontaneity. Even without prior knowledge of Beier’s work or career, this theme naturally surfaces through the weighty maturity of what Real Estate presents. The title is, incidentally, a literal reference to the unsellable nature of the museum space—whose price, if it were on the market, would surely be impressive. But for this occasion, I prefer to translate Estate as “legacy”: an exhibition that takes stock of her oeuvre and career. And this leaves no doubt that Beier is a thoroughly professional artist—someone with experience and skill, capable of composing a refined exhibition. Each sculpture is stunningly precise and powerful, to the point of reflecting back at you—competitive, ostentatious, arrogant, macho! It makes you grumble under your breath, spinning among the swaying bulls.
I step into one of the side rooms and can’t help but smile. The works use so few means, yet radiate such presence. A bathtub stuffed with a roll of banknotes easily justifies the construction of an entire wall in which it’s embedded. Or three cheap fake mustaches that effortlessly fill an entire room. The sculptures have such fullness that they speak for themselves and allow no mediation. This becomes painfully clear when works are forced to share a space, resulting only in friction—such as when Relief and Sculpture together suggest a kind of living room, or when Great Depression and Fleet are expected to coexist due to their link with water. The curator’s job seems rendered redundant—or rather, absorbed—by Beier. The artworks already carry a scenography within them. More than installations, they become exhibition concepts that unfold effortlessly on their own.
“I know my work is smarter than I am.” What a gift it must be to exhibit Nina Beier’s works. The gleaming porcelain, the expensive natural stone, the glossy plastics—her works fit seamlessly into any bourgeois museum space. They’re brimming with meaning, yet simultaneously allow for endless projection, making them adaptable to nearly any thematic framework. The assemblages speak of the product development of their components. Yet they are so cleverly assembled and so accommodatingly integrated into the exhibition space that the sculptures, in turn, begin to comment on commodification within the art world itself.
Long live the illegal online book databases—I find a whole series of texts on her earlier work confirming what I suspected: she has indeed explored the various aspects of the art world, albeit then in a more literal way. By having others copy her work, by letting performers overlay their oeuvre onto hers, by pitting critics against each other in writing, by appropriating other artworks, by attaching clauses to sold works. Now I understand why this exhibition feels so confrontational: it tinkers with what the role of the artist can be today. In the sculptures I find traces of scenography, curation, art sales, material management, market value, location—even art criticism. She draws all these different components and professions of the art world into the artwork itself. And this makes me think of how the practice of being an artist is being mercilessly reshaped by the phenomenon of professionalization.
It has become necessary to complete an art education, to build a convincing portfolio, to find and fund a personal studio, to be able to write applications, to present and interpret one’s own practice. Artists are expected to be cunningly intelligent, because as a counterbalance to identity-based art, a middle-class artist can only be relevant if they can formulate a clear research question and gather a critical apparatus around themselves. An exhibition is no longer merely a collection of artworks: location matters, communication, social context, an audience (sometimes invited and even paid), sales, a curator, workshops, talks, vernissage, finissage, and afterward, a circular story of materials. Showing art has become a complex practice in which artists are expected not only to participate in nearly every aspect but also to excel in them. And this professionalization seeps into the artworks themselves. When Céline Mathieu turns exhibition texts into poetry, these take her sculptures by the hand. When Natasja Mabesoone spends months assembling a massive collage of references, that compendium becomes a lens through which to read the work. When Kasper Bosmans fills a storybook with eagerly shared anecdotes, the artworks understandably become props for the storyteller. When Deborah Bowmann pretends long enough to be Parisian decorators, they might just become real scenographers.
Beier’s work incorporates so many roles within the art circuit. This growing professionalization—driven by an increasingly demanding art world—could, paradoxically, lead to greater autonomy and have an emancipatory effect for the artist. When the artwork is no longer tossed around passively and helplessly, but rises as an active, willing subject, it can bend the mechanisms of the art world itself. An artwork has the power to thaw the frozen positions within the art scene into a simmering artist-run stew. Artists, curators, gallerists, scenographers, critics, assistants, audience mediators, executors—art workers of the world, liberate yourselves!
Jonas Synnave Apers