A NEW WORLD ORDER From the V&A to Venice, Martin Roth is no stranger to the big stage. But for this year’s Biennale, he’s focusing on undiscovered talent and emerging markets in a reinvigorated search for what’s new in art. Words by FRANCESCA GAVIN
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am standing outside an art-deco villa on the edges of southwest Berlin. The area exudes a kind of serenity that feels a perfect place to step away from the intensity of the creative world and think. This is where Dr Martin Roth has returned to after years overseeing some of the world’s largest and most broadly conceived museums – from Dresden’s German Hygiene Museums to the Victoria and Albert in London. He is now no longer at the helm of a giant ship, and is rethinking his next moves. His first project is co-curating the Azerbaijan pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Dr Roth – a slim, well-dressed, sharply intelligent gentleman in his early sixties – has a long-running connection to Baku and Azerbaijan. “It’s a very long story, but I’ll try to make it short,” he begins over tea and apple cake at his dining-table. He had long been interested in
38 Baku.
the contemporary art from former communist countries, reflecting his own experience of a changing German landscape in the 1980s and 1990s. “I was really interested in what would happen in all those countries after the political change,” he continues. “I learnt that contemporary art was quite active in Baku. I went there and met the curator Leyla Akhundzadeh. She was just brilliant. A lot of energy, extremely solid, reliable. She had created a show of contemporary art from Azerbaijan in Dresden in 2008. Normally with those shows, people aren’t really interested. But not with that exhibition – a lot of people came. Honestly, it was a surprise. A few years later, she had a horrible car accident and was killed. That was my first contact [with Azerbaijan]. You could even call it a kind of emotional contact,” he muses. He first travelled to Baku in the early 1990s after becoming aware
