Fermenting Ourselves (metabolize/in search of a container to hold it)
Saturday, June 2, 2:00–4:00 pm
In this performance lecture, curator-artist Lauren Fournier responds to Laurie Kang’s A Body Knots through the perspective of her own ongoing curatorial research project Fermenting Feminism (2017-). The lecture takes shape as a series of fictocritical propositions on microbial life and death; the esoteric affects of chemicals; the tensions between preservation and transformation; the hazards of sincerity; and what it might mean to compost white feminism. Playfully citational and vaguely psychoanalytic, Fournier opens up space to process Kang’s exhibition in relation to larger ideas, problems, and trends in contemporary feminist, materialist, conceptual, and speculative practices.
Biography
Lauren Fournier is a curator, writer, artist, and PhD candidate. Her research is focused on the histories and practices of “auto-theory,” contemporary feminist art and literature, and experimental approaches to theory, literature, and art writing. Born and raised in Regina/Treaty 4 Territory, Saskatchewan, she is currently based in Toronto where she is completing her PhD in the Department of English at York University. She has published widely on contemporary art and literary practices, and her writing appears in
Canadian Art,
Magenta,
Contemporary Women’s Writing,
a/b: Journal of Autobiography Studies,
Comparative Media Arts Journal,
Canadian Journal of Woman Studies, and
West Coast Line, and in the edited collection
Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada. Recent curatorial projects include
MENTAL HEALTH (White House Studio Project),
Autotheory (Vtape),
The Sustenance Rite (Blackwood Gallery),
Fermenting Feminism (CDCC, Front/Space, Büro BDP), and
Out of Repetition, Difference (Zalucky Contemporary). She is the recipient of the 2018 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, and her exhibition
epistemologies of the moon will open at the Art Gallery of Guelph in September 2018.
www.laurenfournier.net.
