RESIDENCY
Camille Lévy-Sarfati
Curator
Research residency
01.2025 - 02.2025
Photo: Thania Petersen, Jieker, June 2022, 32Bis, Tunis.
Selebe Yoon is pleased to welcome curator and researcher Camille Lévy-Sarfati for a research residency in Dakar, for a duration of 6 weeks.
Residency
“This residency will be an opportunity to continue the counter-mapping work begun within the Afro-Asian continents and their diasporic canvases, through the study of interactions between ritual practices, artistic productions and political struggles (illustrated elsewhere by artists such as Thania Petersen or Michael Rakowitz). From Dakar's “official” artistic and cultural networks to the country's interstitial spaces where art, ritual and politics intermingle (including dhikrs, pilgrimages, processions and other forms of public expression of spirituality), these encounters will nourish a curatorial practice envisaged as narrative, relational and empathetic, i.e. as a practice of intercession between audiences, artists, theorists and members of civil society.”
- Camille Lévy-Sarfati
Biography
An independent curator and writer based in Tunis, Camille Lévy-Sarfati is the former director of the 32bis art centre. Her research focuses on the question of ritual as a political space and on practices of resistance or survival that bring together the fields of contemporary art, the spiritual and the political. She is particularly interested in contemporary practices in North Africa and West Asia, around which she has devised various exhibitions and accompanying programmes. At the same time, she is making a documentary film about the experience of returning home, questioning the nationalisms and conflicting memories linked to Tunisia's Jewish history.
In 2022 and 2023, she curated the exhibitions Can We Sing Together Again, Old Friend? by the South African artist Thania Petersen and Injurier le Soleil at 32bis, as well as the programmes of performances, debates and screenings Ce n'est qu'à la tombée du jour and Je bois le désordre du monde between Paris and Tunis, with the Kadist foundation. In 2024, she collaborated with the Villa Medici in Rome and the Careof art centre in Milan on the video programmes Ellil al ghadhab li nahlamou (let's dream at night and rage) and Ya ness essmeou el ghriba (come and listen to the strange). n 2024, she curated Miss.Tic's first solo exhibition at the Palais des Papes in Avignon: Miss.Tic: À la Vie, à l'amor. Art dans la ville, poétique de la révolte (1985-2022) and the group exhibition Nos douleurs montées sur un soleil comme sur un cheval de course as part of Jaou, a contemporary art festival in Tunis.
She is the co-founder of the Nessij collective (‘canvas’ in Arabic), which aims to promote the Tunisian art scene internationally, encourage the mobility of artists and art workers, and strengthen solidarity between art scenes, particularly in the South.