24.11.17 – 23.01.18, 11:00, Essential Reading #1 Eva Barois de Caevel

Essential Reading is a project that aims to enlarge, diversify and enrich Kunstenbibliotheek’s book collection. Which books are, today, really indispensable for an art library? Guests of Essential Reading bring together and present in the library the books they consider most valuable in their life and work.

Eva Barois De Caevel (°1989, based in Paris) is an independent curator, writer, and researcher. Her interest focuses on socially engaged practices in contemporary art, and their interaction with postcolonial concerns. Invited by KASK to present her practice through a workshop and a lecture, she discussed the traditional communication structure of the narrative biography: « When you are invited to stand in front of other people as a speaker, it implies that you are in a position of doing it — that you are in some way ‘a specialist’ of something—, but I became convinced that it implies also some sort of unsaid presupposition about your being ‘successful’, whatever that means ». What are the feelings experienced when confronted to structural power relationships — how are the « narratives of success » received and enjoyed when imposed on us in a postcolonial and neoliberal world?