Panel: France-Vancouver
Saturday, June 14 2014, 6pm
Western Front Grand Luxe Hall
303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver
Please join us for a panel discussion between six French curators and three local participants on the occasion of their research visit to Vancouver. Alexandra Baudelot (Co-Director, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers), Marie Cozette (Director, Centre d’art contemporain - La Synagogue de Delme), Laurence Gateau (Director, FRAC Pays-de-Loire), Marta Ponsa (Head, Department of Artistic Projects, Jeu de Paume), Claire Le Restif (Director, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry-le Crédac), and Vincent Verlé (Director, Centre d’art Bastille-Grenoble) will discuss their programs, institutions and research: Outlier Contexts and Communities (with Nigel Prince, Contemporary Art Gallery); Interstitial Spaces (with Amy Kazymerchyk, SFU Galleries Audain Gallery) and Experiential/Experimental (with Lorna Brown, artist and independent curator), with Shelly Rosenblum (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC) as the evening’s moderator.
For more details, visit belkin.ubc.ca.
France-Vancouver: A Curatorial Conversation is hosted by the Western Front and co-presented by the Consulat Général de France, Vancouver, the Contemporary Art Gallery, SFU Galleries and the UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
Curator Biographies
Co-director since 2013 of Les Laboratories d’Aubervilliers in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, Alexandra Baudelot has worked as exhibition curator, editor and writer. In 2009, she created and managed the contemporary art platform Rosascape, an independent art centre based in Paris. Baudelot is interested in production strategies, the artistic research process and reflections on the role of artwork and ways of sharing it with the public.
Marie Cozette is Director of the Centre d’art contemporain - La Synagogue de Delme, located in a 19th century synagogue in rural eastern France. Since her arrival there in 2007, Cozette has curated numerous solo exhibitions by artists including Susan Hiller, Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci, Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet, and Erick Beltran, and collaborated with guest curators including Mathieu Copeland and Anna Colin to create exhibitions on themes of identity, migration and the politics and sounds of ethnomusicology. In 2004, Cozette co-founded and co-curated Bétonsalon, an independent art space in Paris.
Laurence Gateau has been Director of FRAC Pays-de-la-Loire since 2005, where she has curated exhibitions by artists including Thomas Huber, Fabrice Hyber, Monica Bonvicini, Gina Pane, Tatiana Trouvé, Martin Boyce, Jand Marc Camille Chaimowicz. (The French Regional Contemporary Art Funds (FRAC) are public collections that were created in 1982 to disseminate contemporary art within each region of France.) From 2000 to 2004, Gateau directed Villa Arson Nice where she curated numerous exhibitions of senior international artists including Gary Hill, Mona Hatom, Paul McCarthy Mark Lewis and Fiona Tan, with a special survey exhibition on Chinese artists in 2004.
Since 2007, Marta Ponsa has been Head of the Department of Artistic Projects and Cultural activities at the Jeu de Paume, Paris where she is responsible for the Jeu de Paume’s online exhibition space Espace Virtuel and webzine, Le Magazine. For Espace Virtuel, Ponsa has curated exhibitions on Mark Lewis, Samuel Bianchini and Agnès de Cayeux. Prior to this, she spent eight years in the Department of Photography and Visual Arts at La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona where she organized exhibitions by Richard Avedon, Lee Friedlander and Pierrick Sorin.
Claire Le Restif has been Director of the Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry-le-Crédac since 2003, where she has worked with artists such as Lara Almarcegui, Leonor Antunes, Mircea Cantor, Peter Coffin, Aurélien Froment, Geert Goiris, Friedrich Kunath, Mathieu Mercier, Jessica Warboys. As an independent curator, Le Restif has organized exhibitions for numerous venues, including: Attitudes, Geneva; Kunsthausbaselland, Basel; Smack Mellon Center, Brooklyn; Aksanat Art Center, Istanbul; and Academia de Bellas Artes, Madrid.
Vincent Verlé has been Director of the Centre d’Art Bastille in Grenoble since 2011. In 2001, Verlé arrived in Grenoble while managing the artistic collective Ici Même. He became the art critic for a local cultural newspaper, while at the same time collaborating as one of the contributors for Nouvelle Galerie, a local contemporary art gallery. He joined the Centre d’Art Bastille as Manager of Public Programs when it first opened in 2006, where he continues to focus on composing and creating coherent approaches and dialogues between artworks and engaging new audiences.
