Natasha Marie Llorens will produce a series of articles on artistic practice in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco with a commitment to reworking the colonial organization of center and periphery. Her work will examine independent experimental art spaces across the North African region that bring artists from the Maghrebi diaspora into dialogue with those based in North Africa. Examples include the 2023 Mediterranean Biennale in Oran, a collaboration between Oran-based artist Sadek Rahim and Paris-London-Algiers-based artist Zineb Sedira; and Artifariti, an annual performance and photography festival held in the Western Sahara, a highly contested territory between Algeria and Morocco whose people have been fighting for liberation since the mid-20th century. Llorens’s writing will contribute to the anglophone critical reception for artistic production in the Maghreb, which is an important alternative to francophone arts writing in this region.
Natasha Marie Llorens is a writer, independent curator, and professor of art theory at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She writes about contemporary art and film with a focus on the representation of violence and decoloniality in the arts and institutions. Llorens’s writing has been featured in publications including Arab Studies Journal, art-agenda, ArtReview, BOMB, Contemporary Art Stavanger, Critical Interventions, CURA, frieze, Ibraaz, the Journal of North African Studies, Kunstlicht, Modern Painters, La Belle Revue, Pastelegram, World Policy Journal, and WdW Review. She has been a fellow at the American Institute for Maghrebi Studies, the Centre nationale des arts plastiques (Cnap), the French-American Cultural Exchange (FACE Foundation), and the Jan van Eyck Academie. A graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, she also holds a PhD in modern art history from Columbia University. Llorens is currently working in collaboration with Tours-based artist Massinissa Selmani on a two-year artistic research project about “1,000 Socialist Villages,” an urban planning initiative launched in Algeria in the mid-1970s.