'My work is not illustrational: it's associative, intuitive.'

LYNNE TILLMAN Joan, you’ve just come from MoMA.

- Lynne Tillman

What was it like installing this … are you calling it a retrospective?

JOAN JONAS I’d never do that. I’m calling it a survey because it is not everything I’ve made, but it’s a lot.

LT How do you figure out the best way to show all this very diverse work?

JJ You have to make a model, so a model, actually two, were made: one is at my place and the other, which was the working model until very recently, is at MoMA. And then I worked also with the curator, Ana Janevski, who is very good. The MoMA team has been in my loft doing research and going through the archives for almost three years, so they knew the work incredibly well by the time I got to MoMA.

LT How did they make the selection? You have one of the most varied careers, with numerous works across multiple disciplines.

JJ In 1994, I had a show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where I turned a lot of my performances into installations, meaning I rearranged the material and changed the form but kept the same content. In turn, these installations were documented on video. Since then, I’ve been developing some of those works continuously. They get shown over and over again. I know installation is also a general term for arranging things but, for me, it is a form that I work with. And, in the case of this show at MoMA, many of the works have been exhibited already: first at Tate Modern, London, in 2018; then at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, in 2019; and, most recently, at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 2022–23. So, we’ve added some new works to the MoMA show to make it more unique and interesting.

LT And more current?