Dieter Roelstraete (b. 1972) was trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent and is a curator at the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKA. His current exhibition, The Order of Things is about the use of image archives, image banks and other classificatory impulses in contemporary art. It takes as its point of departure a web-based project by Vancouver artist Roy Arden, The World as Will and Representation, an online archive of some 30,000 jpegs. The exhibition considers the chaotic amount of visual images available in contemporary society and the ironies implied in artistic scrutiny, much of which takes the shape of projects that seek to impose or reveal the hidden order of things and at the same time, adds to the visual overload. The Order of Things includes the work of Canadian artists Roy Arden, Luis Jacob, Arthur Lipsett, and Steven Shearer.

Other curatorial projects have included Emotion Pictures; Intertidal, a survey show of contemporary art from Vancouver; Academy: Learning from Art and The Projection Project. In 2005 he co-curated Honoré d’O: The Quest in the Belgian pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. An editor of Afterall and a contributing editor to A Prior Magazine and FR David, Roelstraete has written extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues including monographic essays and publications on the work of Luc Tuymans, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Steven Shearer, Mark Manders, Gabriel Kuri, Iannis Kounellis, and Roy Arden, whose exhibition he curated at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007. He is a tutor at De Appel Curatorial Training Program in Amsterdam and at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Dieter Roelstraete lives and works in Berlin and Antwerp.