As part of the lecture series Making Art for Whom? organized by the Department of Visual Arts, we are pleased to invite you to Cédric Fauq’s talk, which will take place on Monday, 15 December 2025 at 6 pm on the HEAD - Geneva Campus.

The Curator is the Vampire
What — or who — gives curatorial work its energy? What are its weak points? Its powers? Its weapons? In an effort to conceptualize the paradoxical position of the exhibition curator, this talk sheds light — in order to better expose it — on the inherently extractivist and vampiric character of this node of within the art system. Beyond a critique of the curator as an institution, it intends to outline and embrace the possibilities offered by vampirization.

Cédric Fauq is Chief Curator / Head of Programming and Collection at the Capc Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux, where his most recent projects include the retrospective Rammellzee Alphabeta Sigma (Face B), the collective exhibitions Air de repos (Breathwork) and Barbe à Papa, as well as the performance festival L’Académie des Mutantes (launched in 2022). At the Capc, he has also collaborated with artists K. Desbouis, Camille Aleña, Nina Beier, Abbas Zahedi, Olu Ogunnaike, Sung Tieu, Aria Dean, and Maxime Bichon. From 2020 to 2021, he was a curator at the Palais de Tokyo. Prior to that, he was Exhibitions Curator at Nottingham Contemporary (United Kingdom). He also develops independent projects and recently worked with Matthieu Laurette on his retrospective exhibition at MAC VAL.

Making Art for Whom? is a lecture series organized by the Department of Visual Arts at HEAD – Geneva. It invites artists, researchers, and curators to examine the various forms of engagement within artistic practices. Making art has always involved forms of resistance and resilience, whether through the individual commitment of the artist in their work or through collective strategies. Making Art for Whom? explores the diversity of critical positions that respond to the geopolitical and ecological urgencies shaking our contemporary world. The series aims to reflect on the various approaches, practices, strategies, formats, and audiences that imply the question for whom, and why, do we make art? through diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives.