Underskog

Natasha Marie Llorens will present a brief overview of six exhibitions that comprise her long-term curatorial research project, Children of Violence. The project as a whole presents artwork that renders visible contemporary forms of social violence: racism, homophobia, toxic masculinity and misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia and fascist nationalism. Llorens will use case studies to draw out the overarching ethical questions this kind of work raises for the curator.

The Children of Violence is also a series of five semi-autobiographical novels by post-colonial British novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Doris Lessing. The series of books roughly sketches a woman’s coming of age in colonial Africa in the mid-20th Century and her painstakingly slow feminist awakening. Llorens has borrowed the series title for her project as an admission of her debt to Lessing’s feminism, which is feminism born of the acknowledgement of its complicity with whiteness in a colonial context.

This event is part of ‘Curating the social: Meet me at the empty centre’, a residency examining the curator’s role in facilitating social practice in contemporary art, foregrounding the ethical questions of their involvement. It is developed by PRAKSIS in partnership with Norsk Kuratorforening (The Norwegian Association of Curators) and Natasha Marie Llorens.

Natasha Marie Llorens is an independent curator and writer based in Marseille and New York. Recent curatorial projects include “We the Watchers are Also Bodies,” at Hercules Art Studio Program in Manhattan, “The Exposed Suture” in Marseille, and “Mine are True Love Stories….” at the Skowhegan offices in New York. Llorens has held curatorial residencies at Marra Tein in Beirut and at Triangle Arts Association in New York, and is currently the 2017 Entrée Principale curatorial resident at Rond Point Projects in Marseille, France. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Modern Painters, BOMB Magazine, Pastelegram, WdW Review, Contemporary Art Stavanger, Ibraaz, and elsewhere. Institutions taught at include Columbia University and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Curatorial Studies MA program at Parsons in Paris. She is currently developing a PhD at Columbia University, focused on the representation of war in Algerian national cinema between 1965 and 1979.