As Senior Curator and Head of International Relations at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Daria de Beauvais has made bold, intimate, challenging exhibitions that rethink how we experience art. Her practice is driven by literature and overlooked histories.
In her talk, she considers artists as historians, and how they engage with history as a dynamic, contested field, rather than a fixed narrative. Drawing on recent solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo by Thảo Nguyên Phan (Vietnam), Raphaël Barontini (France), Lívia Melzi (Brazil), and Jonathan Jones (Australia), she examines how artistic practices reframe historical knowledge through research, memory, and visual storytelling.
Taking diverse approaches, these artists challenge dominant historiographies by bringing to light overlooked or forgotten episodes of the past, constructing alternative narratives that reconfigure how history is perceived and represented. They act as critical agents who question the ways histories are written, transmitted, and legitimised, expanding our understanding of the past beyond established frameworks.
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Daria de Beauvais is an art historian and curator. She is Senior Curator and Head of International Relations at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and a member of the acquisitions committee of the Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac, Paris. She teaches curatorial practice at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and, with Morgan Labar, leads 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 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.
