Public Lecture: On the Necessity of Transforming One's Practice

Join us at 10.30am on Saturday 2 March for a free talk by Paris-based curator, editor and writer Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, co-presented with The University of Queensland's School of Languages and Cultures, School of Communication and Arts and GOMA. All are welcome to attend. 

About the talk

"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. 

About the speaker

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an independent curator, editor and writer, she lives and works in Paris. Among the projects and exhibitions she curated are Let’s Talk about the Weather. Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis at the Sursock Museum in Beirut (with Nora Razian, 2016), Resilience. Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia at Moderna galerija/Museum of Contemporary Art (Ljubljana, 2013), Conspire – Transmediale 08 at HKW (Berlin, 2008), Our House is a House that Moves at Living Art Museum (Ljubljana, Reykjavik, 2004-2006), and in France Becoming Earthlings. Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge #18 at Musée de l’Homme (with Alexander Klose, Council and Mobile Academy, 2015), Tales of Empathy at Jeu de Paume (2014), The Promises of the Past at the Centre Pompidou (with Christine Macel and Joanna Mytkowska, 2010), Société anonyme at Le Plateau/FRAC Ile-de-France (with Thomas Boutoux and François Piron, 2007). She is curator of the Contour Biennale 9 entitled Coltan as Cotton (2019) and of the first comprehensive exhibition of the videos of the French actress and feminist activist Delphine Seyrig (with Giovanna Zapperi) which will be shown at LaM, Lille, and Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2019-2020).

Between 2010 and 2012, she was co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and co-founder of the European network of small-scale art institutions Cluster. She is a co-organizer and co-founder of the seminar Something You Should Know at EHESS, Paris (with Elisabeth Lebovici and Patricia Falguières), and a member of the research group Travelling Féministe, at Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, Paris. Between 2014 and 2017 she was the chief editor of L’Internationale Online, the publishing platform of the confederation of cultural institutions L’Internationale, and was the chief editor of the Manifesta Journal between 2012 and 2014. She contributed to various publications and magazines (e-flux journal, Bidoun, Sarai Reader, Springerin, Parkett Magazine) and various publications. She held lectures and organized seminars in which she presents her ongoing research into situated curatorial practices, empathy, transnational feminism, slow institutions, degrowth, and performative practices in the former Eastern Europe.