Mélanie Bouteloup

Since 2021, Mélanie Bouteloup has been responsible for exhibitions and co-directs a curatorial programme at Beaux-Arts de Paris, France. A Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she co-founded and then directed Bétonsalon - Centre d'art et de recherche and the Villa Vassilieff (2003 - 2020), both cultural establishments of the City of Paris and centres for contemporary art of national interest accredited by the Ministry of Culture. In 2012, she was associate curator with artistic director Okwui Enwezor of La Triennale in Paris. In 2021, she was curatorial advisor to Jacob Fabricius at the Busan Biennale (South Korea).

How to inhabit otherwise?

My curatorial practice starts by looking at what is already there – people, places, relationships – and putting them in motion. It means paying attention to the relations that sustain life and facilitating new forms of cooperation to emerge and take root. How can collections and archives become active resources rather than repositories? How can we multiply stories and unsettle established narratives? How can institutions become porous infrastructures across disciplines, territories and publics ?

Drawing on experiences developed across art centres, museums, art schools, universities and research programmes, I will explore curatorial strategies for working with heterogeneous agencies – bringing different times, histories and forms of knowledge into relation, composing with dispersed initiatives, and allowing diverse concerns to resonate — to open up radical utopias.

I am interested in making institutions more alive by cultivating interdependencies, enquiring into the conditions in which life can flourish, fabulating what might have been and what might become – not simply to reframe what exists, but to make other ways of inhabiting the world imaginable and, eventually, possible.