Mai-Thu Perret

Talking Heads

Wednesday 27 March 2013

Mai-Thu Perret, artist and teacher, Visual Arts faculty
in conversation with Samuel Gross, art historian and director of the Speerstra Foundation

Auditoire James-Fazy
Boulevard James-Fazy 15
1201 Genève

HEAD – Genève is pleased to announce Mai-Thu Perret’s participation in the Talking Heads lecture series. Based in Geneva, the artist is a leading figure on the Swiss scene. Her work, which is widely exhibited in Switzerland, has also been displayed at prestigious institutions in various European countries and the United States. As part of her multi-faceted, demanding and refined work, full of historical references and open to many different fields, she is sometimes a curator or editor. She has been a teacher at HEAD Geneva’s Visual Arts faculty since 2009. Together with Samuel Gross, art historian and director of the Speerstra Foundation, she discusses the key issues in her work and the most striking moments in her outstanding career.

Born in Geneva in 1976 and having graduated in English literature from Cambridge University, she worked as an assistant to various New York artists such as John Tremblay and Steven Parrino, with whom she would later work closely. In 1999 she returned to Geneva to spend two years programming the Forde contemporary art space at the Usine autonomous cultural centre, and began to exhibit her work in Switzerland and elsewhere. These initial exhibitions (CAN in Neuchâtel, 2001, Air de Paris in Paris, 2002) laid the foundations for a project entitled The Crystal Frontier, based on the life of a feminist utopian community in the New Mexico desert. The artist produced the writings and created the traces of this imaginary community as a collective, polyphonic portrait through installations, everyday objects or extracts from personal diaries.

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