Claire Tancons
Curator
Trained as a curator and art historian at École du Louvre in Paris, Université de Montréal, the Courtauld Institute in London and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York, Claire Tancons practices curating as an expanded field and has experimented with the political aesthetics of walking, marching, second lining, masquerading and parading in large-scale public performances for close to a decade. As a curator of performance, Tancons organized the first New York solo exhibitions of artists Robin Rhode at Artists Space (2004) and Ralph Lemon at the Kitchen (2007) as well as one of the first showcases of Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky’s Re-Birth of a Nation project at Paula Cooper Gallery. As the artistic director of large-scale public performances since 2008, Tancons has featured works by artists including Los Carpinteros, Ebony G. Patterson, Marlon Griffith, Marinella Senatore, Nicoline Van Harskamp, and Mohamed Bourouissa as well as collaborated with architect Gia Wolff and musicians Christophe Chassol and Arto Lindsay.
She has curated for established and emerging international biennials including Prospect New Orleans (2008); the Gwangju Biennale (2008); the Cape Town Biennial (2009); Biennale Bénin (2012) and the Göteborg Biennial (2013). Since 2012, she has initiated a series of collaborations tackling different aspects of public ceremonial culture, civic rituals, carnival and processional performance including Far Festa: Nuove Feste Veneziane (with curatorial collective CAKE AWAY; IUAV University and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, summer 2013), Public Practice (with Delaney Martin; New Orleans Airlift, Fall 2014) and EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (with Krista Thompson; CAC New Orleans, 2014-15 and ICI New York 2016-18). Tancons was also a guest curator for the BMW Tate Live Series at Tate Modern (2014) and the artistic director of Tide by Side, the opening ceremony of Faena Forum Miami Beach (2016). She is currently the artistic director of etcetera: a civic ritual for Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, France (2015-17).
