Making it new: Vasif Kortun, curator of the UAE pavilion at the next Venice Biennale

"It's a hard act to follow," says the Turkish curator Vasif Kortun, speaking from his home in Istanbul. "It was a very strong curatorial proposal. It had a very nice look. I mean, you know, it was a great start." The "it" in question is the UAE's 2009 debut at the Venice Biennale, the oldest and most prestigious art biennial in the world. That was the first time a Gulf country had exhibited at the event and the Emirates arrived in force, making a two-pronged assault on la Serenissima.

In the Adach platform, a show curated by the French scholar Catherine David examined the texture of life in the Emirates through documentary and archive materials as well as contemporary art. The UAE national pavilion, curated by Jack Persekian, playfully interrogated the very notion of a national biennial via a self-deconstructing audio guide. The job of curating the national pavilion for 2011 is Kortun's. He knows he has some big shoes to fill. "It's one thing to make a very modern project in a small or a scaled-down space," he says. "It's a completely other thing to do this; to realise this project in a place which is in effect probably the largest space given to national pavilions ever, in the history of Venice."

He says that in 2007 the space now occupied by the UAE pavilion was the home of the African exhibition. "And the Africa pavilion had so many artists and it's a whole continent, whereas this is just one country. It's a big challenge." Still, Kortun should be equal to the task. "I am not a biennale curator," he tells me a little coyly. "There are many more biennales that I have actually turned down than I have curated. So it's not like I'm crazy about trying to do as many biennales as I can." Yet he has done an awful lot of them.

"I think I come from that kind of generation," he says, "the early curatorial generation, I should say, where we came to maturity through biennales. Because those were biennales, from the very end of the 1980s all the way through the 1990s, they were basically the only agency, the most promising agency, that changed the art world as we knew it." And Kortun played his part in that. He twice curated Turkey's entry to the Sao Paulo biennial, and in 1998 he co-curated the whole event. He has curated biennials in Tai Pei and Tirana and Albisola. In 2007 he curated Turkey's pavilion at Venice. In addition he helped set up the Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art and also the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. He was interested, he admits, in the kinds of art institution that could serve as a counterweight to commerce.

"I'm not against the market. It's just that I'm against the way the market is overdetermining the art complex at the moment," he says. "At the same time, we know full well that we provide almost a recruitment ground or a research and progress for the market at the same time. It would be quite ridiculous to say that the biennale is completely alien and independent of the market and its interests." That note of detached analysis is unusual in the art world, and perhaps reflects Kortun's background as a historian. He got into art "completely by chance", he explains. "I switched to art history and did my graduate work in the States, in art history. And then I tried to write a chapter of my thesis and I got very bored." The thesis on 19th-century theories of modern art in the Ottoman empire was shelved and Kortun drifted into art-writing and then curating, "and I just went on like that".

Now, despite having travelled a long way from his PhD thesis, a historian's interest in macro-scale trends is evident in his curatorial outlook. It even explains why he was eager to work on the UAE pavilion. "The direction of the world is not going westward," he observes. "It's going eastward. Things are going east and south. And fundamentally, being from a place, which is Istanbul, which was once the capital of a place which is certainly not what you could call the West - this obviously is a very symbolic shift, or a very critical shift, for me."

Things are changing fast, Kortun believes. "The greatest artists and the most energy are today coming from the places that people never expected would be on the map of the art world 30 or 20 or 15 years ago." Chief among them is the Emirates. "The UAE holds critical import," he says, "in the sense that the way it is connected to the Middle East and also the way it is connected to west Asia and south-east Asia turns it by default into a very critical zone. And this zone is developing at a pace that no other place is developing."

Reflecting on the West's role in his evolving picture of the art world, he is dismissive. "I don't want to work in Europe. I kind of get bored there, you know?" he says. "I go to other places in the world, I'm quite happy, my curiosity is piqued, my reality is turned upside-down. That's what we really want. I mean, that's what I want." Even the Venice Biennale, he believes, is something of a relic. "If you were to do the model again you would not do the Venice model," he says. "It's not the biennale of our time." Its national focus, with pavilions representing the various sovereignties of the world, is a holdover from the 19th century, the "World Fair model". Nevertheless, "it's the only biennale that in a way can gather as many people from as many nations as it can compressed in this space". And by joining forces with the UAE, Kortun is in a position to do what Ezra Pound urged writers to do: make it new. "I think the more nations there are in the biennale, the better it is," he says. Kortun may deny that he's biennial man, but with his CV, he should know.