Claire Tancons
Claire Tancons is a curator and scholar invested in the discourse and practice of the postcolonial politics of production and exhibition.
For the last decade, Tancons has charted a distinct curatorial and scholarly path in performance, inflecting global art historical genealogies with African diasporic aesthetics as well as decentring and othering curatorial methodologies as part of a wider reflection on global conditions of cultural production.
Tancons is currently a curator for Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber (with Zoe Butt and Omar Kholeif), slated to open in 2019. Over the last decade, she has curated for established and emerging international biennials such as the Göteborg Biennial (2013), Biennale Bénin (2012), Cape Town Biennial (2009), Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008) and Gwangju Biennale (2008).
As a curator of performance, Tancons organised the first solo New York exhibitions of artists Robin Rhode and Ralph Lemon at Artists Space (2004) and the Kitchen (2007). As the artistic director of large-scale public performances since 2008, Tancons has collaborated with artists/directors Delaney Martin and Mohamed Bourouissa, musicians Christophe Chassol and Arto Lindsay and architect Gia Wolff. She has also featured the works of art practitioners such as Antoni Miralda, Marinella Senatore, Marlon Griffith, Nicoline Van Harshkamp and Los Carpinteros.
Over the last decade, the processional performances that have become a hallmark of her practice have transformed such iconic public spaces as diverse as Gwangju’s May 18 Democratic Square, Cape Town’s Company Gardens, Göteborg’s Götaplatsen and Miami Beach’s Collins Avenue, Venice’s streets and squares and New Orleans’s backstreets as well as Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and into sites of participatory experiments and civic interventions.
Tancons was recently a co-curator (with Johanna Auguiac) of the first edition of Tout-Monde, Caribbean Contemporary Arts Festival (organized by the French Embassy Cultural Services, Florida & Puerto Rico), Miami (2018–2019). She served as artistic director of etcetera: a civic ritual, Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, France (2017).
Other curatorial highlights include Tide by Side, the opening ceremony of Faena Art’s Miami Beach district (2016); Up Hill Down Hall, a BMW Tate Live commission in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2014) and En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (with Krista Thompson) organised and presented by Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and co-organised as a travelling exhibition by Independent Curators International, New York.
Tancons frequently speaks at international art and academic forums, most recently in 2017 at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, US; Söderton University, Stockholm; Leeds Beckett University, UK and Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP).
Her writings have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Small Axe, Third Text and e-flux as well as exhibition catalogues and translated into several languages. Her curatorial practice has been anthologised, most recently in The New Curator (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2016) and Perform, Experience, Re-Live: BMW Tate Live Programme (London: Tate Publishing, 2016).
Through Extemporary, her artistic production company, Tancons is currently directing and producing Minshall: Mas of the Millenium, a short documentary feature about Trinidad masman Peter Minshall (in collaboration with Abigail Hadeed), and Moi-Mangrove, a feature-length film about her father, Guadeloupean intellectual Gauthier Tancons, (in collaboration with Caecilia Tripp).
Over the years, Tancons’ independent vision has been supported by a Prince Claus Fund Artistic Production Grant (2009), two Curatorial Research Fellowships from the Foundation for Art Initiatives (2007, 2009) an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship (2008) and an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2012). In 2016, she was selected by Artsy as “One of the 20 most influential young curators in the US.”
Tancons holds an MA in Museum Studies from École du Louvre, Paris (1999) and an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2000). She is also a former Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York (2001).
Born in Guadeloupe and based in New Orleans, Tancons works in situ.
Address: www.clairetancons.com
For the last decade, Tancons has charted a distinct curatorial and scholarly path in performance, inflecting global art historical genealogies with African diasporic aesthetics as well as decentring and othering curatorial methodologies as part of a wider reflection on global conditions of cultural production.
Tancons is currently a curator for Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber (with Zoe Butt and Omar Kholeif), slated to open in 2019. Over the last decade, she has curated for established and emerging international biennials such as the Göteborg Biennial (2013), Biennale Bénin (2012), Cape Town Biennial (2009), Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008) and Gwangju Biennale (2008).
As a curator of performance, Tancons organised the first solo New York exhibitions of artists Robin Rhode and Ralph Lemon at Artists Space (2004) and the Kitchen (2007). As the artistic director of large-scale public performances since 2008, Tancons has collaborated with artists/directors Delaney Martin and Mohamed Bourouissa, musicians Christophe Chassol and Arto Lindsay and architect Gia Wolff. She has also featured the works of art practitioners such as Antoni Miralda, Marinella Senatore, Marlon Griffith, Nicoline Van Harshkamp and Los Carpinteros.
Over the last decade, the processional performances that have become a hallmark of her practice have transformed such iconic public spaces as diverse as Gwangju’s May 18 Democratic Square, Cape Town’s Company Gardens, Göteborg’s Götaplatsen and Miami Beach’s Collins Avenue, Venice’s streets and squares and New Orleans’s backstreets as well as Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and into sites of participatory experiments and civic interventions.
Tancons was recently a co-curator (with Johanna Auguiac) of the first edition of Tout-Monde, Caribbean Contemporary Arts Festival (organized by the French Embassy Cultural Services, Florida & Puerto Rico), Miami (2018–2019). She served as artistic director of etcetera: a civic ritual, Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, France (2017).
Other curatorial highlights include Tide by Side, the opening ceremony of Faena Art’s Miami Beach district (2016); Up Hill Down Hall, a BMW Tate Live commission in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2014) and En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (with Krista Thompson) organised and presented by Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and co-organised as a travelling exhibition by Independent Curators International, New York.
Tancons frequently speaks at international art and academic forums, most recently in 2017 at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, US; Söderton University, Stockholm; Leeds Beckett University, UK and Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP).
Her writings have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Small Axe, Third Text and e-flux as well as exhibition catalogues and translated into several languages. Her curatorial practice has been anthologised, most recently in The New Curator (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2016) and Perform, Experience, Re-Live: BMW Tate Live Programme (London: Tate Publishing, 2016).
Through Extemporary, her artistic production company, Tancons is currently directing and producing Minshall: Mas of the Millenium, a short documentary feature about Trinidad masman Peter Minshall (in collaboration with Abigail Hadeed), and Moi-Mangrove, a feature-length film about her father, Guadeloupean intellectual Gauthier Tancons, (in collaboration with Caecilia Tripp).
Over the years, Tancons’ independent vision has been supported by a Prince Claus Fund Artistic Production Grant (2009), two Curatorial Research Fellowships from the Foundation for Art Initiatives (2007, 2009) an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship (2008) and an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2012). In 2016, she was selected by Artsy as “One of the 20 most influential young curators in the US.”
Tancons holds an MA in Museum Studies from École du Louvre, Paris (1999) and an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2000). She is also a former Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York (2001).
Born in Guadeloupe and based in New Orleans, Tancons works in situ.
Address: www.clairetancons.com
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Catalogues by Claire Tancons
Burials are for the living and the dead. They allow the dead to be remembered
alive, and the living to remember the dead. Burials are not for
the undead. The burials of the undead are usurpations. The undead have
crept in, assimilating the civilizational codes and mimicking the rituals
of the living that were killed under their dominion. Let the old queen of
England be buried and saved by her god. The gods of the dead, roaming
amidst these words, only meddled with her former Catholic god,
however reformed, out of historical contingency, spiritual necessity, and
ideological expediency.
The timeline provides the context for understanding the long genealogy of performance practices in the Caribbean related to Carnival, of which the works of the artists in En Mas' are the latest outcomes.
Papers by Claire Tancons
*(Gwangju Biennale, 2008; Cape Town Biennial, 2009; and Göteborg Biennial, 2013)
Burials are for the living and the dead. They allow the dead to be remembered
alive, and the living to remember the dead. Burials are not for
the undead. The burials of the undead are usurpations. The undead have
crept in, assimilating the civilizational codes and mimicking the rituals
of the living that were killed under their dominion. Let the old queen of
England be buried and saved by her god. The gods of the dead, roaming
amidst these words, only meddled with her former Catholic god,
however reformed, out of historical contingency, spiritual necessity, and
ideological expediency.
The timeline provides the context for understanding the long genealogy of performance practices in the Caribbean related to Carnival, of which the works of the artists in En Mas' are the latest outcomes.
*(Gwangju Biennale, 2008; Cape Town Biennial, 2009; and Göteborg Biennial, 2013)
Epic in scope, KANAVAL inverts the tropes of modern history premised upon an outlook that is no longer considered ruefully myopic or even blisteringly blind, but consciously criminal. Her KANAVAL is more than the history of Haiti by the people of Haiti through carnival masking, role-playing and mythmaking in the city of Jacmel; it is a history of the modern world as born in and of Haiti and of kanaval as its accursed share.