Conference by Natasha Marie Llorens
In Assia Djebar’s classic film, La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua, a painting by Mohammed Khadda is curiously placed, or displaced, lurking in the semiotic background. This lecture will examine this placement by contextualising Khadda’s work in mid-1970s Algeria and analysing the way in which both artists conceptualised the role of language in their subjective and collective emancipation, as well as the consequences of their encounter.
Natasha Marie Llorens
Natasha Marie Llorens is a writer, independent curator, and professor of art theory at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
She writes about contemporary art and film with a focus on the representation of violence and decoloniality in the arts and its institutions. Llorens’s writing has been featured in publications including Arab Studies Journal, art-agenda, Artforum, ArtReview, BOMB, Contemporary Art Stavanger, CURA, frieze, Ibraaz, the Journal of North African Studies, Kunstlicht, PARSE Journal, Modern Painters, La Belle Revue, World Policy Journal, and the WdW Review, among other arts publications and catalogues.
She has been a fellow at the American Institute for Maghrebi Studies, at the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), the French-American Cultural Exchange (FACE Foundation), and the Jan van Eyck Academie. Graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, she also holds a PhD in modern art history from Columbia University. She won the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2022 for short-form writing. Llorens is currently working in collaboration with Tours-based artist Massinissa Selmani on a two-year artistic research project about “1,000 Socialist Villages,” an urban planning initiative launched in Algeria in the mid-1970s. The first exhibition associated with this project will open in Algiers in rhizome spring 2023.
