Lauren Fournier

For the Transatlantic Residency program for Canadian Curators in France, she is interested in extending her years-long curatorial project Fermenting Feminism, where she experiments with site-specificity as a conceptual approach that resonates with the focus on fermentation as method and metaphor— where fermentation is, most simply, the process of microbial transformation. Just as a fermenting body will physically change, her project adapts to its local context as it moves to different sites. This multi-year curatorial experiment saw her work internationally displayed and with a range of collaborators, including with the Danish curators Ida Bencke and Dea Antonsen at the Medical Museion and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and Büro BDP in Berlin. This residency in Paris and Montpellier would allow her work on a French-focused iteration of Fermenting Feminism that engages, from intersectional and Indigenous-centred perspectives, the feminist politics of contemporary art and fermentation as it relates to the diversity of communities living in two vastly different geographical areas of France.

Lauren Fournier is an independent curator, writer, and artist based in Treaty 4 lands/Regina, Saskatchewan. Currently postdoctoral fellow in Visual Studies through the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, she works with artist Lisa Steele on a research-creation project that takes up the politics and aesthetics of land, settler-colonialisms, and class in the specific context of Treaty 4 territories. Interdisciplinary and intergenerational, Lauren Fournier has produced curatorial projects across Canada and internationally that incorporated exhibitions, screenings, performances, colloquia, reading groups, workshops, and other conversational modes. Her engaging, dynamic, and accessible approach to curating is informed by her identity as a working-class, first-generation university student and settler. Her work focuses on underrepresented artists, such as Métis and Indigenous artists, racialized artists, women artists, artists living with disabilities and mental health issues, LGBTQ2S+ artists, artists living with HIV/AIDS, gender non-conforming artists, and late-career artists.