Discussions lead and moderated by Émilie Renard with the participation of Antonio Cataldo
This second meeting, adopt a social, economic, and historical perspective as a way to map and deconstruct the structural and material conditions that give rise to unequal institutional practices. Are considered multiple approaches to organising the cultural sector that are situated at the crossroads of feminist, post-colonial, queer, and intersectional thinking.
Art education and social reproduction
Sepake Angiama & Vanessa Desclaux
Within the field of art, how can mediation and educational actions create interstitial spaces that act as social interfaces? How do these intermediate spaces allow for other ways of being together than those permitted by the spaces where artworks are typically presented? Within an institutional framework, what margins can be opened by educational programming to specific forms of creation? How can these programmes enable art institutions to establish themselves locally and sustainably, and thus resonate with their own context?
Experimenting Opacity within a need for Transparency
Marthe Ramm Fortun & Dora García
What about transparency? Do we always have transparent and honest discussions about work conditions in what's known to be an unregulated art world? Does transparency of institutions (budget, material conditions, management) guarantee more balanced power relations (between artists, students, teams, boards, and the publics)? Or is transparency a tool of control when one needs a certain intimacy and opacity to build safe places and avoid forms of censorship? What about trust, intimacy, and opacity?
===
• Émilie Renard
Curator and art critic since 2000, Émilie Renard is Director of Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research since January 2021. From 2019 to 2021, she is associated with La Criée centre d'art contemporain (Rennes) for a season focusing on the relationship between artistic creation and vernacular practices. From 2012 to 2018, she was Director of La Galerie, contemporary art centre in Noisy-le-Sec, and from 2009 to 2012 she has been associated curator of La Triennale, Paris, with Mélanie Bouteloup, Claire Staebler, Abdellah Karroum, and Okwui Enwezor, artistic director. Her curatorial practice is based on the art’s capacity to take action in the social structures and the imaginary, to transform personal perceptions and collective representations. In an intersectional feminist approach, she is attentive to the ways in which power relations operate within institutions, distribute roles and prioritize practices.
• Sepake Angiama
Sepake Angiama is artistic director of the Institute for International Visual Arts (Iniva) in London, where the Stuart Hall Library provides a rich resource for a globalised discourse on the practice of artists and curators from Indigenous, Latin American, African, Asian, Caribbean and Diaspora backgrounds. She served as co-curator of the Chicago Architecture Biennial and initiated under the mango tree, a self-organised gathering of decolonising and unlearning practices. She completed her studies in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, where she received the Monique Beudert Award.
• Vanessa Desclaux
Currently in charge of the Pôle des attentions (public department and cultural programming) at Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Vanessa Desclaux holds a PhD in Curating (Goldsmiths, University of London). Her thesis focused on the impact of neoliberalism on the practice of curating in contemporary art, exploring forms of resistance to the normalization of this practice through the notions of passivity and fabulation. As a curator and writer, she was in charge of the exhibition programme at Bloomberg Space in London between 2009 and 2010. From 2006 to 2009, she worked for Tate Modern as assistant curator on numerous exhibition and performance projects. From September 2016 to July 2017, she was associate curator with Émilie Renard at the Galerie, centre d'art de Noisy-le-Sec. She was also associate curator for the exhibition Michael Jackson: On The Wall at the Grand Palais, Paris (2018 - 2019).
• Marthe Ramm Fortun
Marthe Ramm Fortun's performances present as site-specific storytellings, punctuated by ephemeral sculptural boundaries. Attempting to access closed off institutional spaces, Marthe Ramm Fortun questions autonomy using loss of control and the naked body as an iconoclast mask. Marthe Ramm Fortun is adjunct professor at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and has performed widely, nationally and internationally at spaces such as Bozar, Brussels; Monnaie de Paris; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. Upcoming commissions include the Henie-Onstad Art Center and the National Museum of Art, Norway.
• Dora García
Dora García is an artist, a teacher and occasional curator and writer. She lives in Oslo. She has exhibited her work since the end of the 90s, in, among others, Münster Sculpture Projects 2007, dOCUMENTA13 in 2012, and Venice Biennale 2011, 2013 and 2015. She has directed several films, the most recent being If I Could Wish for Something (2021), and engaged in collective projects such as The Hearing Voices Café and Rose Hammer. She is currently working on a new film and writing project, titled Amor Rojo.
