AMANDINE NANA
ON OCTOBER 17 the exhibition “Tituba, qui pour nous protéger?” (Tituba, Who Protects Us?) will open at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The show highlights eleven artists related to the Caribbean and African diaspora whose work speaks to “the relationship between grief, memory, migration, and ancestrality.” It is the first major exhibition organized at the historic venue by curator Amandine Nana, who was hired by the museum in 2023. Previously, she curated the 2024 show of Chloé Bensahel at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo; founded the fugitive Parisian art space Transplantation; and collaborated on the project “Chimurenga Library” at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 2021, among other projects. Her awards include a 2023 Chaumet Echo Culture Award; a 2021 Foundation Martine Aublet/Musée du Quai Branly research grant; and, with artist Monika E. Kazi, the 2020 Prix Dauphine for Contemporary Art.
—the Editors
HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE CURATING?
A multimedia storytelling practice.
WHAT WAS THE LAST SHOW YOU TRAVELED TO SEE?
The Biennale de Dakar has been postponed to November, but I went to Dakar in May to see “OFF,” the program of independent exhibitions and events powered by the local art scene, which still happened. It was important for me, as someone who is connected to this scene, to be there and support their decision to carry on with the “OFF” without the official biennial. I saw many great shows, but I really loved the exhibitions presented at the Selebe Yoon gallery, with works by Senegalese artist Hamedine Kane and early works never before presented by Dakar-based artist Naomi Lulendo, with whom I’m collaborating on “Tituba, Who Protects Us?”
WHAT UPCOMING EXHIBITION (BESIDES YOURS) ARE YOU MOST EXCITED ABOUT?
“Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica,”opening this December at the Art Institute of Chicago and curated by Antawan I. Byrd. Pan-Africanism is such an important concept infusing my practice; I’m very much looking forward to visiting this show, which aims to present how this praxis based on political utopia and freedom has informed artistic imaginations across the Black Atlantic in the modern and contemporary periods.
WHAT IS ONE SHOW THAT HAD A BIG INFLUENCE ON YOU?
Tino Sehgal at Palais de Tokyo in 2016. I have vivid memories of this show that totally changed my perception of what an exhibition can be (in the sense of a social experiment that privileges the participation of the visitor) and also shaped my critical lens on what kind of narratives and voices are forgotten in institutions. The main concept of the exhibition was to create a context in which the visitor was invited to interact with individuals who were sharing their personal stories with you. I was very inspired by this people-centered approach of an exhibition without objects, but I was also annoyed, because I felt there was really no effort to represent a variety of social and cultural backgrounds.
WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF CRITICISM YOU’VE READ RECENTLY?
“Lessons on Black Art Writing from Toni Morrison” by Zoë Hopkins, which was published by Hyperallergic on August 4. In this piece, Hopkins beautifully and incisively meditates on how Toni Morrison can teach Black art critics to free themselves from the expectation of the white gaze. I really love her conclusion paragraphs:
Morrison’s literature was animated by her burning desire to give Blackness wings, to chart its path of flight from the asphyxiating hold of the White imagination, to look at Blackness in the places where it stands in this freedom. There is no shortage of what we can learn from her solicitude as we seek to narrativize visual forms that have been brought into the world by Black hands.
IS THERE A PARTICULAR IDEA THAT IS INSPIRING YOUR WORK NOW?
I love the idea of ceremony. I draw it from different sources, including from my own cultural background and experiences, but I would say that theoretically, Alexis Pauline Gumbs is really informing my work. I recently had a conversation with choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza on how she was approaching her creations as ceremonies, and I just realized that in so many ways, this is how I also envisioned and choreographed the “Tituba, Who Protects Us?” show. By this I mean that I really wanted it to be not only a visual space or an “exhibition” but also a sensuous space with sound, scent, words—an invitation to reconnect to our own ritual gestures of protection.
WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION HAPPENING NOW WITHIN THE CURATORIAL FIELD OR IN THE ARTS MORE BROADLY?
Conversations about inclusivity and diversity have been quite important in the curatorial field and in the arts these last years. Black and Global South arts practices have gained more visibility in the programming of Western art institutions, but the conversation is still important, as a lot of practitioners embodying these diverse policies are also criticizing the performativity that is often guiding these choices and resulting in a narrowness of how we frame and present non-Eurocentric art. In the French context, as a new generation of artists with immigrant backgrounds are entering the art world and exploring their heritage in their work, there is a real challenge to understand their practices beyond the identity lens; there is a tendency to deny them their artistry.
WHAT DO YOU WISH PEOPLE BETTER UNDERSTOOD ABOUT CURATING?
In our daily life, professionally, there are a lot of project management tasks. There are weeks I feel I spend too much of my time on meetings and answering emails, and not enough alone reading and researching. It can be frustrating, especially if you are coming from a graduate research background and consider yourself first and foremost a writer, and therefore a kind of artist, too. But I truly love the social skills and polyvalence curating requires, and being at the crossroads of all the dimensions of project-making. I love to be an interlocutor of so many different people and professions in a way that transcends the artist-curator relationship.
WHAT PIECE OF ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO AN ASPIRING CURATOR?
I would say, for a contemporary art curator: Enjoy being part of the culture and attentive to art practices around you. I don’t think it’s art history and going to museums that inspired me to start curating contemporary art, but rather noticing and being surrounded by artists from my generation with whom I wanted to be in further conversation and to contribute context so that other people could also experience what was moving me so much in their works. I just love this idea of art as a spatiotemporal moment to gather, empathize, and reflect. My first exhibition as a curator was with artist Maty Biayenda during the “OFF” of the Dakar Biennial in 2018. Actually, it was Maty who invited me to work with her on this project. We met as teenagers on social media circa 2015, both having the same interests and questions, I guess. It was very innocent. This show, presented at the Matter project in Dakar, was a dialogue between her works and my poetry, some of which I published later in 2021 in my first poetry collection, Sur la plantation, je suis l’empoisonneuse. I also wrote a much more conceptual text titled “anachronie,” drawing from Jacques Rancière; it was one of my early critical art writings attempting to complicate the lenses of identity and “representation” with the question of temporality.
WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING A CURATOR CAN DO FOR AN ARTIST?
Have critical conversations. I think we tend to not consider criticism as care, but to me deep attention is one of the most honest forms of care, when it’s driven by love and trust. But it’s not the kind of relationship you can build with every artist.
