Talk: MUSEUM x Cédric Fauq / The Curator is the Vampire

Using the vampire as a metaphor, Fauq looks at curatorial practice as both vulnerable and powerful, both extractive and generative. The talk moves from a critical reflection on the curator as an institutional figure to an open discussion of the possibilities that arise when one acknowledges — and perhaps even embraces — this vampiric dimension of the role.

Cédric Fauq is Chief Curator and Head of Programme and Collections at the Capc Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. He has led major exhibitions and projects including the retrospective Rammellzee: Alphabeta Sigma (Side B), the group exhibitions Air de repos (Breathwork) and Barbe à Papa, and the performance festival L’Académie des Mutantes (launched in 2022). He has previously worked as a curator at Palais de Tokyo and Nottingham Contemporary and has collaborated with numerous international artists.

The talk is part of MUSEUM, a lecture series about the museum and its role in the ecosystem of art. If the Academy is art’s cradle, is the Museum its grave? What roles do the people working in these spaces play — custodians, doctors, mourners? Are they struggling to keep art alive, or putting it to rest? And if every museum is a kind of mausoleum, what kinds of art does it enshrine, and what ways of looking does it shape?

MUSEUM is a collaboration between the Royal Danish Art Academy and Kunsthal Charlottenborg curated by Simon Dybbroe Møller.