Claire Tancons

Biography

Claire Tancons is a curator and scholar invested in the discourse and practice of the postcolonial politics of production and exhibition. For the last decade, Tancons has charted a distinct curatorial and scholarly path in performance, inflecting global art historical genealogies with African diasporic aesthetics as well as decentering and othering curatorial methodologies as part of a wider reflection on global conditions of cultural production.

As a curator of performance, Tancons organised the first solo New York exhibitions of artists Robin Rhode and Ralph Lemon at Artists Space (2004) and the Kitchen (2007). As the artistic director of large-scale public performances since 2008, Tancons has collaborated with artists/directors Delaney Martin and Mohamed Bourouissa, musicians Christophe Chassol and Arto Lindsay and architect Gia Wolff. She has also featured the works of art practitioners such as Antoni Miralda, Marinella Senatore, Marlon Griffith, Nicoline Van Harshkamp and Los Carpinteros. Through Extemporary, her artistic production company, Tancons is currently directing and producing Minshall’s Mas, a short documentary feature about Trinidad masman Peter Minshall (in collaboration with Abigail Hadeed), and Moi-Mangrove,a feature-length film about her father, Guadeloupean intellectual Gauthier Tancons.

Tancons was recently a co-curator for the first edition of Tout-Monde, Caribbean Contemporary Arts Festival(in partnership with the French Embassy Cultural Services), Miami (2018). She served as artistic director of etcetera: a civic ritual, Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, France (2017). Other curatorial highlights include Tide by Side, the opening ceremony of Faena Art’s Miami Beach district (2016); Up Hill Down Hall, a BMW Tate Live commission in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2014) and En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, organised and presented by Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and co-organised as a travelling exhibition by Independent Curators International, New York. She has also curated for established and emerging international biennials such as the Göteborg Biennial (2013), Biennale Bénin (2012), Cape Town Biennial (2009), Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008) and Gwangju Biennale (2008).

Tancons frequently speaks at international art and academic forums, most recently in 2017 at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, US; Söderton University, Stockholm; Leeds Beckett University, UK and Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Her writings have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Small Axe, Third Text and e-flux as well as exhibition catalogues and translated into several languages. Her curatorial practice has been anthologised, most recently in The New Curator (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2016) and Perform, Experience, Re-Live: BMW Tate Live Programme (London: Tate Publishing, 2016).

Over the years, Tancons’ independent vision has been supported by a Prince Claus Fund Artistic Production Grant (2009), two Curatorial Research Fellowships from the Foundation for Art Initiatives (2007, 2009) an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship (2008) and an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2012). She is the recipient of a 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her book Roadworks: Processional Performance in the New Millennium.

Tancons holds an MA in Museum Studies from École du Louvre, Paris (1999) and an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2000). She is also a former Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York (2001).

Born in Guadeloupe, Tancons lives in diaspora and works in situ.

This person is part of Sharjah Biennial 14.