On Jan. 31, the Hood Museum of Art welcomed two world-renowned modern art curators, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, to Hanover to deliver the 2025 Walter Picard Lecture. The annual talk is part of the Harris German/Dartmouth Distinguished Visiting Professorship Program, an initiative created in 1987 to bring German academics to the College.
Bardaouil and Fellrath are co-directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin — one of the largest public collections of modern art in the world — and founders of the curatorial platform Art Reoriented. They presented “Rewind. Rewrite. Re-Orient.: Can Curation Change Perspective?” — a lecture on the moving pieces of exhibit curation — to an auditorium of Dartmouth students, professors and members of the Hanover community.
In their slideshow presentation, Bardaouil and Fellrath outlined “local context, exhibition venue, architecture of the space and art selection” as the four fundamental factors of art curation that, when cohesively executed, allow an exhibition to be “more than the sum of its individual parts.”
During the lecture, Fellrath likened the role of art curator to that of the “conductor of an orchestra.”
“When you hear great music, you’re not going to consciously decipher, ‘Oh, now that instrument is playing this, and it’s written in that key,’ but you will appreciate the effect of a whole and what the music feels like,” he said. “The same applies to exhibitions as well.”
Like the backtrack in a song, Fellrath described the exhibition venue as a vital element of art curation that often goes underappreciated. He compared the importance of surrounding architecture to the display of a purse — noting that presentation impacts reactions to the piece itself.
“Architecture is one [factor] that is even more specific because you can’t fight it,” Fellrath explained. “When you go to a fancy shop, and there’s only one handbag on one table, you read it very differently than when you go to a sale, where there’s hundreds of handbags.”
The first Walter Picard Annual Lecture was delivered by Andrews Meyer-Landrut in 1991 as an event to spotlight Dartmouth’s visiting German academics and intellectuals. In 2019, studio arts professor Viktor Witkowski took over as director of the Harris Program, with the goal of broadening the program’s outreach to “the cultural sphere." In line with that goal, Witkowski invited Bardaouil and Fellrath to Dartmouth after touring their 2023 curation in the Hamburger Bahnhof.
“I wanted to make sure that certain institutions or departments on campus that hadn’t traditionally used the Harris Program would use it, and the idea for this particular visit with Till and Sam was to involve the Hood Museum,” Witkowski explained.
Witkowski said one of his goals for the program is to foster a “real collaboration” between Dartmouth and its international visitors and to “introduce Dartmouth to [the visitors] so that when they go back to Germany, they are aware we are here.” He added that he was “super excited” about the event, noting that it saw “a really solid turnout.”
During the Q&A portion of the lecture, Dartmouth’s audience members from all corners of campus posed a vast array of curiosities — from detail-oriented questions about the specific use of wood-paneling in one of their traveling exhibitions to meditations on accessibility within “high art.”
Fellrath said he was “struck by the inquisitive minds of the students, the openness, the curiosity but also the sharpness of the questions.”
Victoria Tong ’25 said she was impressed by Dartmouth’s ability to feature such important figures in the “global art scene.” She described the 2025 Walter Picard Lecture as an “invaluable opportunity” to learn about art, Berlin and risk-taking.
“The last few months have been a really interesting time at Dartmouth where all of these big names and prominent figures are coming, and they seem to be delivering the same message: we need to be more creative,” Tong said.
As an economics student at Dartmouth with a long-standing appreciation for modern art, Tong said she was inspired by Fellrath’s nontraditional career path, which began in the economics and political science spheres.
“There is hope for me to have an encore career in something that doesn’t solely have to do with economics,” Tong added.
Art history major Chandini Peddanna ’25, who joined Bardaouil and Fellrath for a meal at Pine Restaurant the day before their talk, characterized the duo’s curatorial process as “fresh” and “inspiring.”
“When I’ve met with curators in the past, they have a very rudimentary kind of way of doing things, like, ‘This is the way it’s always been done, so this is the way we’re gonna stay with it,’” Peddanna explained. “But I feel like the way [Bardaouil and Fellrath] interact with the art goes beyond thematic experimentation. They’re interacting with the building and the culture of the people of the places they’re representing.”
Throughout the lecture, Fellrath and Baradaoil emphasized the importance of “challenging art hierarchies” and “tearing down” the elitism and classism traditionally associated with art museums.
“‘Nice’ is a little boring,” Fellrath quipped during the lecture.
His aim, instead, is to create a “physical, guttural encounter” similar to music, food and other digestible artforms that “don’t ask all these complicated questions.” Fellrath said he privileges visceral art that “makes you feel something” over conceptual art to which it is more difficult for the general public to connect.
Fellrath and Baradaoil said they empower visitors to their museum by encouraging the “democratic and open power to interpret a work of art.”
“We actually want people to form their own opinions and be critical of what museums put out there, and critical of the world,” Fellrath said.
