Naz Bescan

My current research and practice are based on my personal experience of being a nomad professional and individual in the global world. Inspired by this experience, my main area of interest is the tensions between the global and the local apparent on the individual level of the personas in the art world, in the object level of an art work and on the exhibition level. I believe these tensions between the global and the local within a curatorial practice can be at least intermittently broken through the use of technology, of digital and online tools when they are adapted in critical manners. I see my practice as a curator as artist focused and collaboration based as a way of resisting the reproduction of a particular modus operandi. Putting care for people, let that be the artists or audiences, at the centre, I believe curating can be an empowering tool for everyone involved through opening space for production of knowledge. 

In my MA dissertation ‘In Foreign Land: The Global Exhibition, The Foreign Curator and The Romanticised Local’, I focused this area of interest to the contemporary art biennials which I see as intrinsic reflections of the contemporary neoliberal context and how this results as a particular hubris in curating. I looked into cases in which foreign curators proposed to or were invited to curate a mega-exhibition in cities that they were not natives of. My research showed that the understanding of locality within the mega-exhibition format is a romanticised construct which the foreign curators unintendedly failed to grasp. 

In ‘Who cares? A radio tale’, my graduate project that took place at Gasworks, I also worked with these tensions between the global and the local. Inspired by the international artist residency programme of Gasworks, this project adopted the concept of affective labour and explored its various echoes in the global economy. Its live radio-broadcast format allowed the project to be available on the international level with a total reach of 3700 listeners from all over the world as well as working with artists from all over the world including former Gasworks residences.