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Curator Marlene Wenger shares her journey from traditional art spaces to leading the House of Electronic Arts (HEK) in Basel. In this conversation, she unpacks the challenges and possibilities of digital art, the importance of media literacy, and how institutions can embrace emerging technologies like AI. A deep dive into curating with curiosity, relevance, and imagination in a fast-evolving world.
HEK - Haus der Elektronischen Künste in Basel - is one of the most important institutions for digital and media art in Europe. Marlene Wenger, its Head of Curation, has built a programme that educates as much as it exhibits: Sunday workshops, mushroom and mycelium artist sessions, university collaborations for the upcoming "Quantum Visions" show. She is trying to create the conditions under which genuinely new digital art can find the audience it deserves.
Marlene Wenger is Head of Curation at HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste) in Basel, Switzerland, where she was previously Head of Communications. She holds a PhD on post-internet art and was an early specialist in the Swiss and German-speaking digital art scene before it became globally visible. Her previous experience with Art Basel Unlimited - one of the most significant large-scale installation programmes in the international art market - gives her an unusually precise sense of what serious institutional presentation of ambitious digital work requires.
The comparison between AI and photography is the most useful framework Marlene Wenger offers: photography was greeted with alarm by painters, became a distinctive medium in its own right, and eventually changed everything about how we understand images. AI is on a similar trajectory, and HEK is one of the institutions trying to support that trajectory thoughtfully rather than reactively. This conversation explores how Wenger curates at the edge of what's possible - how she chooses artists for "Other Intelligences" (AI and organisms) and "Quantum Visions," what she thinks the VH Awards showcase with Hyundai Art Lab demonstrates about digital art's institutional moment, and why the education programmes she runs are inseparable from the exhibitions.
AI compared to photography's invention
The history of photography offers the most useful perspective on AI art: not a threat to existing practice but a new medium that takes decades to develop its distinctive possibilities. Wenger's historical framing is more useful than most of the futurist or alarmist takes available.
"Other Intelligences" and the organism-technology encounter
Curating AI alongside organisms - bacteria, plants, non-human life - reframes the AI question: rather than asking "can machines be creative?" it asks "what kinds of intelligence exist, and what do they produce when placed in relation?" This is a richer curatorial framing.
Education as curatorial practice
The Sunday workshops, the mushroom artist session, the university collaborations: for Wenger, education is not supplementary to exhibitions - it is the mechanism through which audiences develop the capacity to encounter difficult work on its own terms.
Virtual HEK and community plans
Wenger's ambitions for a virtual HEK and Discord community reflect a conviction that the institution's community extends well beyond its physical space - and that the tools for building that extended community are available and should be used.
"We try to operate in this realm of giving food for thought, but also giving a fun and sensual activity or experience with the artists."
HEK is the kind of institution that shapes what digital art becomes - through its exhibition choices, its educational programming, and its willingness to take on work that hasn't yet found an audience. Marlene Wenger's curatorial thinking is a guide to where the most ambitious digital art is heading and what it needs to thrive. Collectors who want to stay ahead of the conversation should be paying close attention to what HEK is doing.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
