Muriel Enjalran was invited to come to New York from Paris as the first ICI/French Institute Fellow, in partnership with the l’institut français in Paris and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York. After participating in ICI’s Curatorial Intensive in Summer 2012, she conducted research into artists who engage with the public sphere and explore the relationship between art and politics beyond conventional practices. Enjalran takes the works and activities of Justine Triet, Ângela Ferreira, and Caetano Dias (artists residing across various continents) as a departure point for interrogating how their work attempts to redefine aesthetics, therefore redefining art and politics while engaging with the social. Read Enjalran's full essay about her Fellowship research, Between the Politicization of Art and the Aesthetics of the Politics: the Margin of the Artist.
"The past two years have shown tremendous international popular uprisings from New York to Cairo to Athens, and as art continues to emerge as a vehicle for expressing political movements, the traditional artwork has been generally augmented by art as a process, increasingly contributing to an aestheticization of politics," she writes. "New York offers a space to witness theory in action alongside a myriad of contemporary art spaces and cultural institutions." As her research in New York progresses through studio visits, lectures, academic studies and professional networking, Enjalran's writing will continue to unearth international artists and practices working against the grain of standardizing the relationship between art and politics. She is also currently working on a monographic exhibition with Hamish Fulton, to be presented in October 2013 at the CRAC Languedoc Roussillon in Sète, France. For this particular project, Hamish Fulton has realized a 23-day solitary walk in the Pyrenees Mountains, which joins Llançà on the Spanish Mediterranean coast to Hendaye on the French Atlantic coast. Learn more at crac.languedocroussillon.fr
