Nicolas Ballet
Nicolas Ballet
Nicolas Ballet is an art historian and associate curator in the New Media Department of the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. He specializes in research into alternative visual cultures, experimental art, sound studies and the avant-garde. He received his Ph.D. from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he teaches contemporary art history.
He has written essays exploring the visual and sonic contributions of countercultures and experimental artistic practices. He is the author of Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music (Les Presses du réel, 2023; Intellect Books, 2025), and has published in Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Octopus Notes, Marges, Optical Sound, Volume !, Revue & Corrigée, Klima, Cahiers du CAP, and Histo.art (Éditions de la Sorbonne) as well as in books devoted to the work of Nigel Ayers, John Balance, Monte Cazazza, Zoe Dewitt, Genesis P-Orridge, The Rita, and to the visual history of black metal (Analogue Black Terror, vol. I, 2019; vol. II, 2021 and Arma Christi: Black Metal Apparel from the 20th Century, 2024).
In 2023, he curated the exhibition “Who You Staring At?” Visual Culture of the No Wave Scene in the 1970s and 1980s at the Centre Pompidou. He also curated Persuasion: Industrial Music and Mind Control (1975–1995) (Geneva, HEAD, 2015) for the research project “MIND CONTROL, Radical Experiments in Art and Psychology 1950–1970,” AntipsychiARTrie: Art and Antipsychiatry from 1960 to the Present (INHA, 2019, with Aurore Buffetault, Hélene Gheysens and Sandrine Meats), “Where May we sit?” Activist Video from the 1970s in France (Centre Pompidou, 2022–23, with Julie Champion and Hélene Fleckinger) and Fred Forest and Information Technology: Archives of Video and Digital Projects (Centre Pompidou, 2024, with Philippe Bettinelli and Rossella Cillani).
Nicolas Ballet was also awarded the Olga Fradiss Prize 2024, from the Fondation Lucie et Olga Fradiss, hosted by the Fondation de France, for the French edition of his book, Shock Factory. Culture visuelle des musiques industrielles (1969–1995) (2023).
He is currently leading a research project on pro-sex perspectives in art from the 1960s to the present. He is also editing the publication of a book on the links between radical psychiatry and the visual arts, and is conducting a new study on the sounds and images of non-places through analog horror, liminal spaces and lost media.
