Weekly Conversations… with Magali Avezou
Meet Magali Avezou, who was residing as guest curator at studio das weisse haus. She is a curator based in London and founder of archipelago, a platform for artistic and curatorial projects focussed on visual culture. She studied arts management at Paris X and photography at Central Saint Martins and London College of Communication. Her curatorial projects include Murmur – on abstraction in photography; burning with pleasure – a research on artist books; 26 Caledonian Road – a site-specific exhibition and This is here – a performative exhibition at St Bartholomew Church in London.
Magali Avezou collaborates with Yet Magazine and Photomonitor.
You created the platform archipelago, for curatorial and artistic projects based in London. Can you tell us more about this platform?
I launched archipelago one year ago as a platform from which lead curatorial projects focussed on visual culture. My background is in photography but I am interested in the broader idea of “image” in contemporary culture. My aim is to question issues like the proliferation of visual input and its implication in social changes and languages. The platform works as a thread for different projects that are independent but connected. Burning with pleasure looks at visual artists working with books. Through this first research, I came across a significant number of artists working with abstraction. It lead me to question this tendency contrasting with the constant representation of the real today. And that was the starting point of the second project, Murmur, an exhibition where sound artists respond to visual artists, in an intent to explore what Alfred Barr called “emotional abstraction”.
During your residency, what project will you be working on?
I have started a year ago a research project on visual artists working with books. During my stay in Vienna, I am researching books and independent
publishing projects. I meet with artists, curators and publishers to get an idea of Austria’s scene in this field and collect works that I will display within an exhibition in London in October 2016.
You have stayed in many different countries during the last few years. Do you feel that the athmosphere of the country has a strong influence on your works, or these mediums, that you cover during your project
I got seriously interested in photography when I was living in Barcelona. But photography was booming everywhere in the 2000, and that was not specific to Barcelona. At that time I was also working for a bookshop company. My interest in images lead me to study in London at Central St Martins and London College of Communication. And books stayed naturally part of my world as I worked there for Koenig Books and focussed archipelago’s first project on artists books.
I think my interest in these two mediums doesn’t depend on my location, but each country and context help me develop a different and richer approach to them.