An evening dedicated to the artist Frank Bowling, curator Julia Marchand and exhibition storyteller Chris Cyrille invited several voices to engage in dialogue with his poetic work, including that of artist Dimitri.
It is from a decentered art history, of the Black Atlantic, that he and she suggest approaching the diasporic trajectory of this work, in which the sea and its history (“The sea is history”, wrote the poet Derek Walcott), as well as the geographical - even geological - layers of the world, play a fundamental role.
To approach such a diffracted painting, he and she have invited the words of a poet, an artist, and the distant echoes of the sea. The event is supported by the Frank Bowling Foundation. The artist's work is on view at Hauser & Wirth until May 24, 2025.
Julia Marchand is a curator based in Paris and Venice, curator of the Georgian pavilion at the last edition of the Venice Biennale. A 2015 graduate of Goldsmiths College's MFA Curating program, she curated exhibitions at the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation between 2015 and 2023. She conceived, among others, Action / Gesture/ Paint: women artists and global abstraction 1940-70 (2023); Laura Owens and Vincent van Gogh (2021); Nicole Eisenman & The Modern (2022), Siècles noirs: James Ensor & Alexander Kluge (2019), as well as La Complicité (2020), Niko Pirosmani (2018), Soleil Chaud, Solail Tardif (2018) and La Vie simple - Simplement la Vie (2017).
Artistic director of the curatorial and discursive platform Extramentale, founded in 2016 to analyze adolescent aesthetics in the field of visual arts since the early 1990s, Julia Marchand has worked notably with Saradibiza for the video game TVSF (exhibited at the Centre Pompidou Metz and at the Festival Octobre Numérique - Faire Monde), Mathias Garcia (Extramentale, Arles), Anaïs-Tohé Commaret (Centre d'Art Edouard Manet, Gennevilliers), Mohamed Bourouissa (Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographies), Lisa Yuskavage (Galerie Zwirner, Paris) and works by Henry Darger (Galerie Sultana, Paris). In 2020, she organized a symposium on the carnivalesque at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, with, among others, Claire Tancons, Paul B. Preciado, Jenkinv. Zyl and Jean-Baptiste Carobolante.
Chris Cyrille-Isaac is a poet, art critic, curator and doctoral candidate in philosophy in the French Department at New York University. He teaches theory at the École supérieure d'art de Clermont Métropole and collaborates with various journals and magazines, including Le Quotidien de l'Art. He has also been a columnist for Mediapart's podcast L'Esprit critique.
Co-author of the book Mais le monde est une mangrovité (Rotolux Press, 2023), he also curated the eponymous exhibition at Fiminco in 2021. He directs the transdisciplinary Mangrovity project and chairs the curatorial platform Mangrovity Art Fund. His research explores Caribbean philosophies, black internationalism and anti-colonial literature. After curating the Biennale Intercontinentale de Guadeloupe in 2021, the following year he curated a reactivation of the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists at Villa Romana (Florence). He is a member of the scientific committee of the Édouard Glissant Art Fund and UNESCO's Routes of Enslaved People. A former resident of the Villa Médicis as part of an Ateliers Médicis program, he was also a research fellow at the Centre Pompidou between 2019 and 2020. He is also the winner of the 2017 Dauphine Prize, the 2020 AICA Prize, the ADIAF Émergence 2022 grant and the Cnap 2022 curatorial grant.
Photo credit : © Grégoire d’Ablon and © Damien Jélaine
