Curating Contemporary Art (MA)
Angela Blanc
Commissions by Eva Gold and Adam Christensen delve into notions of control, perversity, desire and heartache. Through text and repurposed film footage, Eva Gold devises scenes of obsessive voyeurism, unraveling how film permeates our dreams and the depth of our psyche. Adam Christensen invites the audience to a performance for the camera in his house-cum-baroque-theatrical-stage, obscuring distinctions between on- and off-set.
In times of reduced mobility, commissions by Aaron Ratajczyk and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi find motion between images. Aaron Ratajczyk stages a one-to-one rehearsal via video call – the screen as proxy to corporeal normalcy – while movements in time and history are proposed by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s multi-layered films. Presented through a fictitious map, the works expand into a rhizomatic network of different media.
For its inaugural week, Sets and Scenarios presented screenings of moving image works that expand our exploration of the relationship between viewer and screen as images penetrate retina and ear, before creeping beneath the skin, toward the flesh, muscles and viscera. The screening programme featured works and contributions by James Richards and Steve Reinke, Cerith Wyn Evans, Deborah Stratman, Shahryar Nashat, Mary Helena Clark, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and others.
Sets and Scenarios is curated by Jade Barget, Angela Blanc, Panos Fourtoulakis, Charlotte dos Santos, Sha Li, Yi-Ning Lin and Lindsey Wiercioch as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects
Angela Blanc is an independent curator, researcher and writer based between Paris and London.
She is particularly interested in moving-image culture and performance practices. Her dissertation titled Working with Contradictions focused on the influence of feminist theories on artistic and curatorial practices and its potentialities and limitations as a means of resistance in institutions. Using Beatrice Gibson's exhibition Crone Music (2019) at the Camden Art Centre as its main case study, the research delved into notions of intimacy, collaboration, and transmission.
For her graduate project, in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary, she co-curated Sets and Scenarios, an online programme of film, text and performance that questioned our heightened proximity to moving images and what it means to live under their influence.
Angela has worked as Assistant Curator in different institutions and non-profit galleries including Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Pompidou Centre (Paris) and Mimosa House (London). In 2017, she was co-curator of the Meurice Prize for Contemporary Art (Paris). She also worked as Education and Public Programme Assistant at La Maison Rouge (Paris).
In 2019, she co-curated Cooperative Lunch #3: A Public Assembly at Cubitt (London). With fellow alumni Lydia Antoniou, she organised at the RCA a series of screenings and conversations exploring themes of sexuality, motherhood and death through the prism of gender and body politics called While Standing in Line for Death. Angela is a member of Diamètre, a Paris-based curatorial collective. In 2020, she co-founded If It’s Good which develops curatorial programmes and research on digital culture, affectivity and identity within contemporary art and society. She wrote reviews for Beaux Arts magazine and This is Tomorrow.
Angela holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art (London), an MA in Research in Art History with a specialisation in Contemporary Art from Paris-Sorbonne; and a BA in Art History and English Studies from the Catholic Institute of Paris.
