Skin in the Game: Conversations on Risk and Contention

From the author of The Metabolic Museum, a new volume on the risks associated with a career in art, from individual pieces to historic museum collections. Building upon the acclaimed fieldwork diary The Metabolic Museum, Clémentine Deliss expands on how artists understand risk and contention both in their work and with regard to historical collections. Skin in the Game is a series of compelling conversations with Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Andrea Zittel. These five women are the subject of the eponymous exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Their conversations raise questions about how to work through institutional collections through the concept of the “prototype” creating a multiplicity of nonexclusive interpretations. They also discuss that moment of having “skin in the game,” when each of them decided to become an artist, and what the “prototype” was that defined their career trajectory. Clémentine Deliss (born 1960) is a London-based curator, researcher and author. In 2020 she was named an associate curator at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin.