Daria de Beauvais, one of the most influential voices in contemporary curating, is visiting the IMA. As Senior Curator and Head of International Relations at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, she has shaped the international art scene through bold, intimate, and challenging exhibitions that rethink how we experience art. Her practice is driven by literature and overlooked histories.
In this presentation, Daria de Beauvais considers the artist as a historian, and how they might engage with history as a dynamic and contested field, rather than a fixed narrative. Drawing on recent solo exhibitions by Thảo Nguyên Phan (Vietnam), Raphaël Barontini (France), Lívia Melzi (Brazil), and Jonathan Jones (Australia) at the Palais de Tokyo, this talk examines how artistic practices reframe historical knowledge through research, memory, and visual storytelling.
Across diverse approaches, these artists challenge dominant historiographies by bringing to light overlooked or forgotten episodes of the past, and constructing alternative narratives that reconfigure how history is perceived and represented. In doing so, they act as critical agents who question the ways in which histories are written, transmitted, and legitimised, expanding our understanding of the past beyond established frameworks.
Registration is essential.
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Daria de Beauvais is an art historian, curator, writer and lecturer. She is currently Senior Curator and Head of International Relations at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris). A member of the acquisitions committee of the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, she teaches exhibition practice at Panthéon-Sorbonne University and co-leads, with Morgan Labar, the seminar Indigeneity, Hybridity, Anthropophagy in the Arts Department at the École Normale Supérieure – PSL.
Her curatorial practice operates at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, grounded in a strong commitment to ethics and care. She engages with questions of ecology, Indigeneity, hybrid identities, and memory, foregrounding marginalised voices and overlooked histories through immersive and poetic forms. Working with a wide network of artists, she fosters transgenerational and cross-cultural dialogue through site-specific commissions and long-term collaborations.
