PRAKSIS and Norsk Kuratorforening (The Norwegian Association of Curators) are pleased to invite curator and writer, Natasha Marie Llorens (US) to develop PRAKSIS Residency No. 8 to be held from 1 November – 29 November 2017.

This residency will take the form of a masterclass with a horizontal structure, with all participants contributing and gaining from each other. Over the course of the month, Llorens and the residency group will examine the curator’s role in facilitating social practice in contemporary art, foregrounding the ethical questions of their involvement. Research and discussion will start out from Llorens’s recent critique of Claire Bishop’s 2012 book Artificial Hells. Published in Contemporary Art Stavanger’s online journal earlier this year, Llorens’s text defines social practice art as an art form that produces events and situations that are out of artists’ and curators’ control, and asks how the idea of responsibility applies in such cases. During the residency, she and the residents will explore ways that social practice might focus more on the ambivalent meanings of relations between people, and less on the authored gesture. How might this be achieved? What new kinds of curatorial practice might support it? And would such practices shape the work of independent curators differently from the activities of institutional curatorship?

Natasha Marie Llorens is an independent curator and writer based in Marseille and New York. Recent curatorial projects include We the Watchers are Also Bodies, at Hercules Art Studio Program in Manhattan, The Exposed Suture in Marseille, and Mine are True Love Stories… at the Skowhegan offices in New York. Llorens has held curatorial residencies at Marra Tein in Beirut and at Triangle Arts Association in New York, and is currently the 2017Entrée Principale curatorial resident at Rond Point Projects in Marseille, France. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Modern Painters, BOMB Magazine, Pastelegram, WdW Review, Contemporary Art Stavanger, Ibraaz, and elsewhere. Institutions taught at include Columbia University and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Curatorial Studies MA program at Parsons in Paris. She is currently developing a PhD at Columbia University, focused on the representation of war in Algerian national cinema between 1965 and 1979.

For more information, please visit PRAKSIS’ website.