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Up Hill Down Hall: An Indoor Carnival, 90-minute processional performance guest curated by Claire Tancons for the BMW Tate Live Series, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, August 23, 2014. Featured: Marlon Griffith’s No Black in the Union Jack under Gia Wolff’s Canopy. Photo by Oliver Cowling © Tate, 2014.

Questions of Practice: Claire Tancons, Independent Curator, On Resistance and Artistic Practice

Questions of Practice: Claire Tancons, Independent Curator, On Resistance and Artistic Practice

During a recent conversation with the Center’s visiting scholar Kristy Edmunds, curator Claire Tancons discussed the complex issue of institutional resistance among artists of particular backgrounds. She argues that artists of African descent who refrain from participating in certain artistic practices, because they fear they may be “pigeon-holed and ghettoized,” may miss opportunities to be a part of the larger discourse around performance art. Tancons encourages these artists to “open up the frame…to reclaim these territories and actually fully embody them…because we are losing so much.”

Visiting scholar Kristy Edmunds and curator Claire Tancons discuss the complex issue of institutional resistance among artists of particular backgrounds. Filmed at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage on November 24, 2014.

Edmunds is the Center’s visiting scholar and is executive and artistic director of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. Tancons is a curator, writer, and researcher whose work focuses on carnival, public ceremonial culture, and popular movements. This conversation took place at the Center on November 24, 2014.