Talk: MUSEUM x Cédric Fauq

In attempting to conceptualize the paradoxical position of the curator, the objective is to illuminate — and thereby expose — the intrinsically extractivist and vampiric character of this particular node within the art system. Beyond a critique of the curator as an institutional figure, the task will be to outline and even embrace the possibilities opened up by vampirization.

Cédric Fauq is Chief Curator / Head of Programme and Collections at the Capc Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, where his most recent projects include the retrospective Rammellzee: Alphabeta Sigma (Side B), the group exhibitions Air de repos (Breathwork) and Barbe à Papa, as well as the performance festival L’Académie des Mutantes (launched in 2022). At the Capc, he has also collaborated with artists K. Desbouis, Camille Aleña, Nina Beier, Abbas Zahedi, Olu Ogunnaike, Sung Tieu, Aria Dean, and Maxime Bichon. From 2020 to 2021, he served as a curator at the Palais de Tokyo. Prior to that, he was Curator of Exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary (United Kingdom). He also develops independent projects and recently worked with Matthieu Laurette on his retrospective exhibition at MAC VAL.

MUSEUM is a lecture series about the museum and its function. If the Academy is art’s cradle, does that make the Museum its grave? Is that why we don’t speak in the gallery? And what does that make of the people working in these houses? Are they custodians, doctors, or mourners? Are they struggling keeping art alive or enjoying putting it to bed? If each museum is a kind of mausoleum, what categories of art does it enshrine and what modalities of spectatorship does it produce?

MUSEUM is a collaboration between the Royal Danish Art Academy and Kunsthal Charlottenborg curated by Simon Dybbroe Møller.