Attending to the Body: A Workshop on Social Practice Art with Curator Natasha Marie Llorens

How to make social practice artwork that attends, in the deepest sense possible, to the body? Social practice art is formed out of meaning made between people, yet in some of the genre’s most well-known critical literatures it can seem as though the body and its vulnerability are conceived as secondary to the artist’s prerogative to authorship. It is an art genre constituted, in other words, by a conflict between the body of the participant and the mind of the maker. This conflict becomes especially interesting when the maker’s own body is also involved. Natasha Marie Llorens proposes a week’s events, workshops and seminars structured around this conflict, which are aimed at giving students the critical tools to locate it within their own work. Practically we'll be delving into: (1) historical work, with reading lists for people to follow up with should they choose to, (2) theory of embodiment reading together and discussing, (3) presentation of students' projects and critiques of those projects in light of the week's problematic.

bio:
Natasha Marie Llorens is an independent curator and writer based between Marseille and New York. Her curatorial research is focused primarily on the relationship between violence and representation in contemporary art from a feminist perspective. She is also interested in the critical value of contemporary painting, and the ethical dimension of social practice in art. She has taught at Columbia University, the Cooper Union and Eugene Lang College, all in New York City, and is currently adjunct faculty in the Curatorial Studies MA program at Parsons in Paris. A graduate of the MA program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, she is currently a PhD candidate in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Columbia University. Her academic research is focused on the representation of war in Algerian national cinema between 1965 and 1979

http://nmllorens.website/

Image (C) "Madison Bycroft, Being Sat, 2017. Photo: NML"

There will be space for 12 students for this course. Please send an email to piya to sign up!