Penser le Présent with Kapwani Kiwanga and Julie Pellegrin

On the occasion of the publication of (Non) Performance: A Daily Practice, author and curator Julie Pellegrin dialogues with artist Kapwani Kiwanga about ways of performing knowledge, care and disorientation.

Although performance art has become an essential part of contemporary art, books devoted to it in French are still rare. In (Non) Performance: A Daily Practice, Julie Pellegrin explores the political effects of performance through conversations with nine artists from diverse backgrounds. Here, she returns with Kapwani Kiwanga to their exchanges on ways of performing knowledge, care and disorientation. Kapwani Kiwanga is a French-Canadian artist living and working in Paris. She studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, and did a post-graduate degree at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2022, Kiwanga was awarded the Zurich Art Prize. She also won the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2020, as well as the Frieze Artist Award and the Sobey Arts Award in 2018. She represented Canada at the 60th Venice Art Biennale in 2024. Kapwani Kiwanga is represented by Galerie Poggi (Paris); Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town and London) and Galerie Tanja Wagner (Berlin).

Curator and art critic Julie Pellegrin is interested in performance art in the broadest sense, and in practices that address social, political and ethical issues by focusing on notions of relationship and attention.For the past twenty years, she has been exploring how the relationships between visual arts, choreography and theatricality affect exhibition writing.From 2007 to 2020, she directed the Centre d'art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel, France). In 2013, she was co-director of Nuit Blanche Paris. Between 2021 and 2022, she was a resident at the Académie de France in Rome - Villa Médicis. She is currently researching the links between performative practices and anarchist theories in the 20th and 21st centuries. (No) Performance. A daily practice by Julie Pellegrin with Béatrice Balcou, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Yael Davids, Catalina Insignares, Kapwani Kiwanga, Myriam Lefkowitz, Loreto Martínez Troncoso, Emily Mast and Gisèle Vienne (T&P Publishing, September 2024).