One of the key privileges of my (professional) life has been a certain freedom to look, and look again, at live bodies in action. Another is being part of a daring community of practitioners who are motivated, able to dream up, and absolutely determined to find the right means to do crazy art projects. Vanini Belarmino’s multi-country In Situ, Performance as Exhibition (2024-25) is one of them. As an art historian, I am interested in the narrative tension shored up by placing known Scandinavian artists in a region unfamiliar to them, and with an audience unfamiliar of them. There is something really satisfying about encountering moments when the incomplete processes of singularity and globalisation are made evident. One may say that it is the ambitious curator’s role to platform these unfamiliar works for an audience that should know them, and in my review for bastard.blog I do acknowledge some of the resonances that I see justifying the exhibition, but that is beside the pleasure point that attracts me to look in the first place. The contemporary art world, let alone the world at large, is always never in sync, and every re-look in a different time and space gives me that distinct and always unique pleasure of encounter.
Read my review of Vanini’s curatorial ambition here.
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