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 specialises in research into alternative visual cultures, experimental art, sound studies and the avant-garde. He received his PhD from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he teaches contemporary art history.

He has written several texts exploring the visual and sonic contributions of counter-cultures 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, in Cahiers du CAP and Histo.art (Éditions de la Sorbonne), as well as in books devoted to the work of Nigel Ayers, Zoe Dewitt, Genesis P-Orridge, The Rita and to the visual history of black metal (Analogue Black Terror, vol. I and II, Arma Christi).

Lately, he curated the exhibition “Who You Staring At? Visual culture of the no wave scene in the 1970s and 1980s” (Centre Pompidou, 2023), as well as the “Sound Art Live” program and the listening lounge of the exhibition “I Never Dream Otherwise than Awake: Journeys in Sound” (Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project, Shanghai, 2024). He also curated the exhibitions “AntipsychiARTrie: Art and antipsychiatry from 1960 to the present” (Institut national d’histoire de l’art – INHA, 2019) with the research group Athamas – Art and Anti-psychiatry and “Persuasion: Industrial Music and Mind Control (1975-1995)” (Geneva, HEAD, April 2-18, 2015) for the research project “MIND CONTROL, Radical Experiments in Art and Psychology 1950-1970.” He also organized the event “Industrial Music and Experimental Films from San Francisco by Marian Wallace” in Paris (Les Voûtes, May 2016), before presenting the cine-concert performed by the French projects Cent Ans de Solitude and Flint Glass on the movie Sprengbagger 1010 (1929) at the INHA in Paris in September 2016.

He is currently leading a research project on pro-sex perspectives in art from the 1960s to the present.