Brushing History against the Grain
Mousse Magazine features a conversation between Karima Boudou, Samson Kambalu and Vincent Meessen on the occasion of the duo exhibition History Without A Past, currently on view at Mu.ZEE, Ostend.
Read the article at the Mousse Magazine website
Karima Boudou (b. 1987) is an art historian and a curator. Trained in art history (Montpellier, Rennes) and philosophy (Nanterre), she participated in the Curatorial Training Programme at De Appel, Amsterdam, in 2012–13. In the past eight years, she has organized research projects, exhibitions, conferences, and publications in Europe and Morocco. Her work intersects theoretically and practically with postcolonial theory and the reactualization of archives and decentered histories of modern and contemporary art, considering strategically the politics of vision and visibility in art history. In 2017 she was a Research Fellow at MAC VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, where she conducted research in the archive of Raoul-Jean Moulin. Her most recent work, reactivated from Morocco, is invested in new research lines on the life and oeuvre of African American Surrealist Ted Joans. This three-day public forum drew points and lines between private American and Dutch archives by reactualizing the legacies of artists and writers of African descent in the international Surrealist movement. Boudou has lectured about the writers Jean Genet and Mohamed Leftah and the artists Glenn Ligon, Danh Vo, Dave McKenzie, and David Hammons. She has written for exhibition catalogues (Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium; Le Cube, Rabat, Morocco) and magazines (Mousse, Ibraaz, rekto:verso).