Artist residencies Art Explora - Cité internationale des arts

Philosopher and psychologist Vinciane Despret teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University of Liège. Passionate about ethology, she has made it the subject of her research. In 1996, she recounted her first fieldwork with birds in Naissance d'une théorie éthologique : la danse du cratérope écaillé. Other publications followed, including Bêtes et Hommes (following the eponymous exhibition she curated at the Grande Halle de la Villette in 2007-2008); Etre bête, co-written with Jocelyne Porcher; Les faiseuses d'histoires with Isabelle Stengers; Penser comme un rat; Que diraient les animaux si on leur posait les bonnes questions? His latest book, Habiter en oiseau, examines the question of territories. The common thread running through his investigations is the question of good research methods: how do we (or don't we) manage to make beings interesting?

Photo credit: Sylvère Petit

Diana Campbell Betancourt is an American curator who has been active in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, mainly in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines. She is committed to the globalization of the art world, and takes a long-term, multi-faceted approach that addresses the concerns of under-represented territories and artists, as well as those of more established artists, in numerous forums.

Since 2013, she has been artistic director and founder of the Samdani Art Foundation, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, whose critically acclaimed 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 editions she has directed. She has established the Dhaka Art Summit as one of the leading research and exhibition structures dedicated to art in South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators and writers from across South Asia through a primarily commission-based model. Alongside her activities in Bangladesh from 2016 to 2018, Diana Campbell Betancourt was also the artistic director and founder of Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines, a non-profit international residency and exhibition program based in Manila and Bataan.

Art historian and curator Christine Macel has been head curator of the Contemporary Creation and Prospective Department at the Centre Pompidou since 2000, where she has organized numerous exhibitions. She was director of the 2017 Venice Art Biennale 'Viva Arte Viva'. Her essay "Le Temps Pris" was published in 2020 by Editions Champs d'art Flammarion. Co-curator of "Global(e) Resistance" at the Centre Pompidou in 2020, she is preparing the exhibition "Elles font l'abstraction/Women in abstraction" at the Centre Pompidou (May 2021) and at the Guggenheim Bilbao (October 2020).

Photo credit: Photo by courtesy of Jean-Claude Planchet

Simon Njami is an independent curator, lecturer, art critic and novelist based in Paris. He co-founded Revue Noire - of which he is editor-in-chief - a magazine devoted to contemporary and non-Western African art. He was artistic director of the first Johannesburg Art Fair (2008), the Bamako Photography Biennale (for ten years) and the Dakar Biennale, Dak'Art (2016-2018). He co-curated the first African Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). He has also curated, among others, the exhibitions Afriques Capitales (Paris and Lille, 2017), African Metropolis (MAXXI Museum, Rome, 2018), The Studio (Kampala Biennale, 2019), Le temps de l'Afrique (Las Palmas, 2020), La Matière vivante (San Giminiano, 2021). 

Njami has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art and photography, including Africa Remix (2004-2007) and the first African contemporary art fair (Johannesburg, 2008). In 1998, he conceived the Pan-African Master Classes in Photography project with the Goethe Institute. He ran these for 12 years and built up the contemporary art collection at the Mémorial ACTe (Guadeloupe). He has published and edited numerous works, most recently Histoire histoires, l'histoire de la Revue noire (2020).

Photo credit: Cyrille Choupas.

Philippe Vergne has been director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto since April 2019. From 2014 to 2018, he was director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. Prior to that, he spent five years overseeing the DIA Foundation in New York, after serving as deputy director and chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. From 1994 to 1997, Philippe Vergne was director of the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Marseille (MAC).

Hans Ulrich Obrist, born 1968 in Zürich (Switzerland), is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. He was previously curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first exhibition, "World Soup" (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has organized over 300 exhibitions, and has lectured internationally at art academies and institutions. He is editor-in-chief of Artforum, AnOther Magazine, Cahiers d'Art and 032C, and a regular contributor to Mousse and Kaleidoscope. He also writes columns for Das Magazin and Weltkunst. Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence in 2011, and the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to art in 2015. Recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) and The Athens Dialogues (2018).

Photo credit: Tyler Mitchell.