Léa Herbeth

My curatorial practice draws from observations on the power of images to support a discourse and I have explored the notion of montage in relation to exhibition-making as a way to rethink archives in my interim project, INTERSTITIAL ZONE at The Showroom and X Marks the Bökship. 

Coming from a film studies background, my current research revolves around the cinematic trailer as a model to rethink the temporality of the exhibition. For my dissertation, I drew my inspiration from cinematographic techniques of montage (Sergei Eisenstein, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard...) but also from the theory of images elaborated by Aby Warburg and Georges Didi-Huberman. 

I am also very concerned with questions of mediation and how to engage with an audience in a non-traditional way. I believe we live in a moment when art institutions are eager to create an overabundance of educational activities, especially as public funding bodies demand a mission of democratisation of culture from them. Discussions in the curatorial field revolve very much around notions of knowledge production and how to transfer ideas to the public. However, it would seem that a lot of curators have no real interest in making their projects visible outside of the professional sphere. Most often, museum-goers can feel estranged from contemporary art. 

In my opinion, there is a need, in the art world, for a new kind of artistic mediation that should stir away from traditional didactic communication tools (wall text...). 

Drawing from my experience at the Serpentine Gallery and at FIAC, for me, this involves creating personal and social connections between the public and a cultural interpreter. I truly think that an audience will have a deeper engagement with an artwork and a more durable memory of their experience when they are solicited by a person rather than by a text on a wall. 

My curatorial practice is grounded in producing exhibitions that are considered hybrids between display and event and draw on characteristics that are generally applied to art practices such as creativity, fluidity and open-endedness.  

Born in France, I trained in art history at the Ecole du Louvre and specialised in contemporary art, and particularly performance and in Theory of Performing Arts and Cultural Project Management at the University of Lille.