About

Join us for a free talk by Paris-based curator, editor and writer Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, co-presented with the University of Queensland’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. "How can we work within and with institutions today, as cultural workers and artists, at a time of violent racialization and profound ecological crisis, when heightened surveillance reinforces the organized and transnational governmental abuse of natural resources and the commons? Having been living in the countries of the Global North whose governments cause and contribute to inhuman civil wars and drone strikes in certain regions of the world, forcing thousands of people into displacement and dispossession, I wish to discuss the necessity to engage various art institutional constituencies of that region through one's own curatorial practice. Looking through my own curatorial projects, where I was invited to work in distinct geographies but within an intertwined geopolitical reality, I will try to address the necessity to slow down one's way of working and being, to imagine new ecologies of care as a continuous practice of support, and to listen with attention to feelings that arise from encounters with objects and subjects. Through the example of the most recent project, the Contour Biennale 9: Coltan as Cotton, I will talk about the possibility of opening up our institutional borders and show how these work—or don’t, and of rendering them more palpable, audible, sentient, soft, porous, and most of all, decolonial and anti-patriarchal." Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez